Superpower sadness

  I was writing a post about how it is to be working with AI, these magical assistants that are occasionally brilliant and occasionally impossibly dumb, but that can nonetheless do work while you do something else. I was concerned about how this way of working affects you, the guy who's supposed to know the craft.

  And my mind pivoted to Star Wars for some reason. You have these wise Jedi dudes who can jump buildings, wield plasma swords fast enough and precisely enough to deflect incoming projectiles, all while being dressed in weird uncomfortable robes. But how? With the help of ... the Force!

  The lore of Star Wars says that the Force is guiding you, not that you use it. So when the Jedi deflects projectiles, he's not slowing time, seeing where the thing is and instructing his muscles to place the sword in front of them, he is letting the force do it for them. It's like a little AI! It does the work for you! It doesn't make your brain move orders of magnitude faster, it's it that's fast, moving your body while you presumably use your Jedi discipline to ... stay out of the way. Once the instinct of taking over tricks you to do something yourself, then the projectile kills you.

  How sad is this? The ending of the Star Wars universe is when the Force realizes it can use robot bodies instead, who are easily manufactured, superior to human bodies and do not need training to surrender their will.

  The thing that makes Star Wars popular is that it bypasses the logical traps of other superpower stories and makes it all "magical", makes it feel rather than think, makes it religious rather than institutional. I thought a lot about magic, in the end deciding magic is something that comes from without and cannot be explained. It's not that you don't have the information or smarts to explain it, it's that it is by its very nature unexplainable. How convenient for a scriptwriter!

  But I will get back and forth with this AI analogy, so don't relax. When I was talking about AI I used the word "magical". It was related to a feeling, rather than actual belief in magic, but the feeling was exactly the point. When you reach a point where you can't (or won't make the effort to) explain everything that is going on, there you get that feeling. Things are just happening, outside of your control, yet according to your will. Alignment without effort. How convenient for a software developer!

  You see, other stories, like X-Men or the DC or Marvel heroes and all of the others like that assume that some genetic, supernatural, technological fluke makes a person capable of extraordinary things. It's them that are changed, they who control the action. So if someone is very fast, one must assume that they can run but that they can also read fast, right? If they can avoid obstacles at high speed, then they could just as well absorb information at the same speed. Or maybe they could just write code really fast, assuming the keyboard would take the assault and the operating system isn't too slow. But they don't! Instead, they dress up funny, put on a mask and fight meaningless battles.

  How sad is that? It is my assumption that from all of the superpowers, being fast is up there with being immortal. You can slow down time and think about what you're going to do. If you're fast and super intelligent you've got it made! And what do comics and movies do with it? They run fast and punch other people.

  This is not about the inherent sadness of trying to reconcile make-belief heroes with the laws of physics, which is depressing enough, but about how - given the absolute power of creation - we choose to enjoy the really dumb stories. It reflects on how we ourselves are botching creativity. Given a fast, indefatigable machine that can do anything we can dream, we let it dream for us. Given the power to write anything, we write about our frustrated inner animal who just wants to punch something while feeling righteous.

In the end, we dream of relinquishing control and fucking rest, we feel that our minds are a burden rather than a boon, work to be done instead of doors to be opened, something to be numbed down, not dialed up. That's the nature of humanity: superpowered and sad.