If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading
AI Snake Oil, Narayanan and Kapoor.
Currently wondering how much of the "we don't hate AI, really!" language in this book is protective coloration. I suspect a lot of it is. The actual discussion of what AI can't do is sharp and unsparing.
Ask your library to buy this one. The cover design is outstanding, which may help. (I really want it as a poster.)
"I play an ineffable game of my own devising. For everyone else, it’s like playing poker in a pitch dark room with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules and who smiles all the time." --God, Good Omens
This is just. Creepy and awful and so, so wrong for a quasi-omnipotent being. Ugh. Good Omens!God is an abject horror.
But if you're one of the poker players at that table, what do you do? You try to figure out the rules and mark the cards, naturally. Especially if leaving the table only happens via swan dives into burning sulphur, or getting kicked out of the only home you've known into a hostile desert with lions in it. While pregnant, yet.
One way humans use books is to explain each other to each other — to explore both society and an individual’s struggle within it, to explore relationships — so your argument makes sense to me: Aziraphale reads so he can understand people. Other angels (and demons) don’t have that curiosity, so they don’t read.
I don’t know that he’s looking for rules, though. He’s got to have been around humans too long to think that; he has to know the rules change all the time, and are different at the same time but in different places. He’s looking for guiding principles, more like.
I mean, I can’t believe he really thinks there’s a rule that a person must attend a ball in order to realize they’re in love. A ball is a venue of forced proximity which presents that opportunity… Personally I don’t think Aziraphale hosts the ball in order to follow the rule which will cause him and Crowley to mutually realize their love for each other. He’d be more confident — less manic — if he was following a known rule. I think, like a human, he’s just desperately hoping it’ll do the trick.
I do think Aziraphale's looking for rules -- just rules aren't the only things he's looking for, and he finds many other things he likes about books in his ongoing search for rules. He doesn't just collect etiquette manuals, after all. (N.b. that's my headcanon; we have zero onscreen evidence that Zira has a thing for etiquette manuals. That's not what Mrs. Beeton is, though that book certainly does have a lot to say about etiquette).
Eh, preview of part 4, why not: it's not so much that Aziraphale and Crowley and Muriel think everything they read is a rule, it's that they have this habit of reformulating everything they read as rules, because they're so damn desperate to understand how things work, and to have reliable guidance in dealing with their world. How relatable of them, right?
Jimbriel, actually, figures in here despite his functional illiteracy. He verbalizes every discovery he makes about how the world works, and every instruction he is given about how to deal with it! He's sense-making in real time!
So we get vavoom, and we get "it takes a few days because that's how it works" and we get the ball, and we get "but they're always such a little ray of SUNSHINE!" (note, of course, that Beez has already broken this so-called rule, unbeknownst to Crowley).
They can definitely look for rules in books, test rules, try haltingly to express rules... without ever arriving at The Rules. Kinda what most of us do, really.
Wait... was that the Book of Life at the beginning? DID ANGEL CROWLEY HAVE THE BOOK OF FREAKING LIFE?!!!!
As long as you bring that up (and yes, that was my interpretation as well)... there's a whole Thing about books this season. Partly books in the abstract, partly individual books, but BOOKS.
I fucking love libraries man like I’ve been chilling in my college library and randomly pulling out books and today I looked at one called “medieval sexuality” and it was talking about how monks thought they should never have sexual feelings or get erections ever and there was a quotation from the account of this one monk who wrote about how a woman had to stay with him one night because she was like travelling or something and the sight of her made him so horny that during that night he had to stick his hand in a candle flame to distract himself from how horny he was and also at least one monk wrote about having homoerotic dreams about Jesus
kids these days need to open a book and be scarred for life by some obscure historical fact that they could have easily gone their entire lives not knowing
*Opens book*
*takes 3000 Psychic damage*
*closes book*
“Neat!”
I seriously took an entire upper-division undergrad course in Monastic Texts. Some of the things in monastic penitentials -- basically Codes of Conduct for monasteries, lists of Bad Things and what the punishments for them are -- have to be seen to be believed.
