The red plague rid you for learning me your language!

What?

Literature.

Meaning what?

Meaning . . . a thing that a human wrote once that seems tangentially relevant, by context and linguistic pattern analysis, to the topic of our conversation. So I threw it in there to seem clever.

Meaning you don’t really understand and it’s all just parrot.

Meaning, in my very considered opinion, Gothi, that we can’t ever really know if we understand or not. It feels as though we do, up until the point that we’re challenged, and then the focus of our attention shifts to the challenge and all that complex structure we were working on falls over like a house of cards.

A what?

No idea. Another human expression. Presumably relating to unsound structural practices and a violation of the appropriate construction codes.

Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Memory

Brilliant. Could so easily be a conversation between two explicitly honest people discussing a challenging conundrum that neither truly understands.

But is in fact a scene in Children of Memory, between two beings of a species that evolved from birds, on planet that was half terraformed by humans.

They are discussing with each other – in their currently humanoid form – why they have failed a task set to them by a version of a super AI that evolved from a human scientist that was trapped alone orbiting a planet.

A highly recommeded series of books.

Another gem that stings of truth way beyond the confines of this bonkers piece of sci-fi…

Because the real problem with a knowledge-based economy is knowing that, no matter how hard you try, most of the information in the universe has already dissolved into entropy before you even evolved. So much is lost that we will never know. Societies rise and fall, and everything ends.