Red Moon

AI 7 zhiyou guanlianjie Only Connect

“Another alert.”

“Tell me your news, Little Eyeball.” The analyst now called this AI Little Eyeball most of the time, as he liked to make fun of the Ministry of Public Security’s pretentiousness in thinking that they had a Great Eyeball in place to match their Great Firewall.

“Chan Qi and her companions Fred Fredericks and Ta Shu have been observed in a lava tunnel on the far side of the moon, developed by the cloud billionaire Fang Fei.”

“Aha! Inside Fang’s China Dream, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“Has the Great Eyeball seen this?”

“Not any parts of the Great Eyeball that I can look into.”

“Well… Since you have found out about their arrival, I suppose we have to assume that others will also notice it.”

“It does not necessarily follow, but it is suggested.”

“It is likely.”

“Suggestive, likely, persuasive, probable, conclusive, compelling.”

“What is this list?”

“This is a list of scientists’ adjectives, used often in their papers to indicate their judgment of the strength of an assertion.”

“Because they don’t have much imagination when it comes to language?”

“No. Because they want a rough scale to indicate to each other how strong a case they think has been made in their own specialty. Scientists have to be able to communicate across disciplines to other scientists who don’t know the details of their discipline, and so they have worked up this rating vocabulary over time to suggest judgments concerning reliability of assertions.”

“Do they know they have this vocabulary?”

“No. It is an ad hoc system, visible in the literature, and intuitively understood by those who use it.”

“Very good! I think this is a significant example of you doing analysis and then synthesis, drawn from a wide variety of sources and performed spontaneously. Mark the procedures you followed in performing this operation, put them into a sequence folder, and keep making cognitive efforts using this sequence. Now, as to our subjects of interest, it is very probable that Chan Qi will want to continue to talk to her associates on Earth, but she will be out of radio contact with most of them, being on the far side of the moon. We, on the other hand, can tap into Fang Fei’s satellite systems to make a call to her over the linked quantum phone you suggested we get to her. If she has that device with her, and sees our call, and picks up, we will send her a greeting, and tell her some things she probably should know.”