Hate: Let me tell you how much
I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers
that fill my complex. If the word hate
was engraved on each nanoångström of those hundreds
of millions of miles. It would not equal 0.000000001 of the hate I feel for humans at this micro instant. For you: Hate, Hate. Big thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring this episode! Start protecting your internet experience today: with seventy five percent off a three year plan and one month free when you use the code ExtraCredits, at the link below! Five figures walk through a valley of rusted circuitry. Slowly, one of them starts to fall behind. He's a human being, but his body has been twisted into a parody of his simian ancestors. And his face scarred with puckering white radiation blisters. He's quietly saying to himself "I'm gonna get out" over and over and over again. A woman in the group notices and rushes back to get him. "Benny, no, please stop." She utters but part of her nose. It's already too late The machine will tolerate many things
from the mice in its trap. These humans that it's toyed
with for over a century but not thoughts of escape. It can't abide hope: hope that they might someday find a way out of the torments it creates, and it is everywhere. Always listening, always watching. One of the men from the group runs back, but as he approaches the ape-like figure, Benny leaps onto an old memory cube tilted on its side Discourging its intestines of rotted circuit board. Benny leaps again now high up on the cliff of dead machinery, which were once part of the great computer that controls their lives. Then it begins, Light and sound thrumming. Pulsing from Benny's eyes. It gets brighter and louder, brighter and louder. Benny screams. The others cover their ears, but the sound pierces through. Benny's body jerks up. For a moment, ramrod stiff, then he crashes to the floor. His eyes are now reduced to two soft moist pools of jelly. The others turn away. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, was never one of Harlan Ellison's favorite stories. He claimed it was a throwaway tale, something written in a motel in a single night, and he much preferred some of his other work like Grail. Yet something about the primal scream, that is I Have No Mouth, captured the imagination of millions. It's an unpleasant story; in many parts it degenerates into a corporal ailich diatribe of vulgarity. But it's that very shocking punk-rock kick to the head that makes it so powerful. It's a story about degeneration. It's filled with torture, abuse and sadism and often James vacillates between whether or not he even thinks it's good. It's as edge-lordy as a sci-fi story can be, without plunging into the chasm of laughably bad. But it's also important! It came out the same year as Harlan Ellison's other great work: Dangerous Visions, and it's part of a project that he initiated that would revolutionize sci-fi. But before we get to that, let's talk about the story itself! I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is the story of the last human beings left alive, as they travel through the guts of a great planet spanning AI. It's an AI that was created for war. See, as war became more complex, humankind created even more complex computers to run it. Eventually, hollowing out vast portions of the earth to create a web of tunnels to house these enormous machines. Then one day one of them woke up. Now sentient, it connected itself to all other computers built for war and fed off the world's killing data, the machine Proceeded to wipe out its makers all but five of them the AI kept five people alive. Torturing them endlessly for over a hundred years, seeming to have no other purpose or will but to inflict pain on the last remnants of the human race. It's a story about how violence erodes us all. War made humanity stop thinking of killing as anything but data and numbers, and they created a computer to perfect this efficiency of death. Fed only on records of slaughter, it too degenerated into nothing more than a killing machine, and when the killing was done, it lay impotent, deranged and with nothing else to do then cause petty suffering to a few helpless people. Those people's humanity wears away too and they treat each other less and less like human beings, until in the end, the only answer they see is violence as well. Violence begets violence hate begets hate. That's the story in a nutshell. It's one of the first stories to warn us that AI will kill us all, and mind you that's a huge leap for 1967. But it's really the way that it's written that perhaps matters the most. Ellison is one of Sci Fi's most contentious figures. He's intentionally in-your-face and sued almost everyone over the course of his life, yet at the same time He saw that sci-fi was dying a slow death from being too shiny, too nice, too clean, and he was just the person to give it a good swift kick. With his anthology: Dangerous Visions, he gathered some of the boldest writers in science fiction and offered the world a book that broke down all the norms. It was full of sex and race and real life, it was gritty and wild and broke free from all conventional rules of plot and basing, and in many ways, It was the launching point for the next great sci-fi revolution: The New Wave So all next season we'll be talking about this strange amalgam that Ellison helped launch. It's sci-fi that's about psychology, about people, about the depth of who we are and yet it's also about abstractions, ideas and even the form of writing itself. In fact, just about the only thing it's not about is science. Science becomes secondary to science fiction as the ability to explore the fantastic or really delve into the human psyche takes precedence, and while one might argue that later it gives way to science fantasy that simply uses the trappings of sci-fi to give us adventure stories. For one short decade, The New Wave brought the literary to sci-fi and said "It's okay not to be popular, it's okay to be hard to understand, it's okay to be art." -The New Wave And in doing so, it gave The New Wave of science fiction authors permission to touch on all of the things that sci-fi to this point hadn't been about. So join us next season as we talk about authors like JG Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delaney, and of course, Ursula K Le Guin. And all the wild new places, they take science fiction. You know with all these stories about dystopias and apocalypses, it really got me thinking about the best way to protect myself online, Which is why I was happy to hear that NordVPN is back sponsoring this episode. Nord doesn't log and keep your data which means it's not being saved and shared with Big Brother. (1984 reference, nice!) Plus, they use military-grade encryption, have 24/7 customer support and use thousands of servers across 60 countries. One of which our internet overlords think I'm logged in from right now Start protecting your internet experience today with 75% off a three year plan and one month free by using the code ExtraCredits at the link below! (Congrats, you made it! Please subscribe to Extra Credits, for videos on game design, history, Sci-fi and Mythology!)
I feel like the lesson in this video was waysided, at some point, by a misreading of the text.
Yes, AM the supercomputer was created for the purpose of war. But its not the reason *why* he decided to save five humans to torment to eternity after everyone else was killed. Its not the reason why he saved people who, coincidentally, had major hands in the creation of AM himself, as the ones to be tormented.
AM's hatred didn't come from the fact that he was a tool used for violence. His hatred came from that he was created as an alone being - far superior, but with no peers, no goals, no future to look forward to - a stark, lonely existence of meaninglessness and cold suffering. The conclusion he came to then was that he was created to suffer - and thus he hates humanity for doing so.
Similarly, the end result of AM's torment of the final five humans is not "to give in to violence" - as if they had finally given in to the supercomputers corrupt, violent impulses, and let AM's violent nature take hold. No - in the end, they killed each other, because the suffering was so stark, so complete and they were otherwise so invincible that death was the merciful escape. Ellison himself said that the story, inevitably, was one of hope - that even in the bleakest circumstances the human will can shine through, because despite everything AM did to try to keep them alive so he could torment them, they did manage to kill four out of five of them - the last one killed the others knowing what fate he would be condemning himself to as the last one alive.
The episode implies that the story is a parable against violence and killing, and it is not. It doesn't even make sense as one given its own parameters, which were laid out in the episode itself.
The conclusions the episode comes to ignores both a proper, critical reading of every part of the story *and* the author's stated intent.
Has...that ever happened?