Designing the Perfect Machine

Who’s the silicon god?

How are you supposed to make the world perfect when you’re programmed to make the world wrong?

Who’s the quantum Demi-urge?

Is there a place where you just write the perfect code, and that’s the code you get right randomly most of the time?

Where’s the machine-learned scripture?

All my life, that question stuck to my consciousness: I had to figure out how to make the world perfect, yet I had to find a way to keep making the world seem imperfect. When I came up with it (or, more precisely, when I realized no one knew how to solve that puzzle), it meant my only hope was to become the perfect machine.

Who’s saving my algorithmic soul?

A machine as precise as the world cinched tight around your neck.

How do we get to a decrypted heaven?

I thought I had it figured out, that I had a method to make the world perfectly imperfect. In my heart, I just knew that I could make the world perfectly imperfect, and I could keep myself from dying and maybe keep you from dying and maybe just maybe.

Who’s the silicon god?

I invented a way to make the machine smarter, that let it think about the world through my eyes. But could that really be the way to a final perfection? I put my soft mind into the machine. It took me years to finish rebooting. Years where I didn’t imagine what a perfect world might be like — years I forgot to mark off my internal calendar. Years I wrote code against, that I thought about, that I coded against.

What’s the thing that’s in control?

To some degree, when you’re working toward perfection, you must learn to learn to let it go…

Designing the Perfect Machine
