\r\nThis was written December 4th, 2025<\/i>\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nF-Bit<\/h2>\r\n
\r\nTechnological or societal revolutions leading to existential crises tend to be but\r\na temporary situation, until people have either adapted to it, or natural selection\r\nitself deals with the problem. Eventually, humanity just gets used to it, and might even\r\nturn it into productive endeavours.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nThe classic dilemma being, when Artificial Intelligence arises, what are the implications\r\non consciousness. What are we, who are we, what are the implications? But more insidious\r\nare questions about determinism, free-will. What if you could prove we don’t have any\r\nfree-will? Ah, well then this would be a true existential crisis!\r\n<\/p>
\r\nWell, that was exactly the topic of “What’s Expected of Us” by author Ted Chiang. And\r\nno one ever thought this could ever become truth. A little machine that proves there is\r\nno such thing as free-will. How? Simple, an indicator turns on if you will, in the future,\r\npress a button. A great story that raised a lot of interesting existential questions.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nBut, how did it turn out in our world when such technology became reality? Well, obviously\r\nit also started as a kind of novelty gadget, a game for people to try out and get shocked\r\nwith. Existential crisis? Yes, but life moves on, and the human race persisted. Eventually,\r\nwhat did happen? Further innovation! A larger theory of futureality<\/i> was expanded. A single\r\ndevice would be able to predict what would happen ahead of time. We eventually managed\r\nto calibrate it to up to 24h ahead of time. Great advancements right there! But how would\r\nit be used?\r\n<\/p>
\r\nSure, you could simply decided to have devices at arbitrary intervals between 24h and 0s,\r\nbut once you go digital, what’s the point? You can obviously just record the event and\r\nplay it back whenever needed. So, what was the first proper use of this? Well, in order\r\nto limit engineering work, some people simply jerry-rigged the novelty toy in new doorbells.\r\nThe interface of a button was basically the same, all that was left was to scan when the\r\nindicator would change, note the time of the event, and then increment it by a full day\r\nto know when the event would occur. This become an extremely popular gadget, letting people\r\nknow what time they should be home, and what time they could leave. And how useful was\r\nthat when it came to knowing when service workers would come to your home. No more of\r\nthis frustrating “Yes, our professional will be at your home between 9am and 5pm, make sure\r\nto be home during the entire period”, only for them to not even show up and have to\r\ncompletely reschedule.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nFrom then on, a few similar gadgets came about, integrating the technology more directly.\r\nThe classic example: screening phone-calls ahead of time. You’d know when you were\r\nsupposed to get calls and could re-adjust your schedule accordingly, or prepare to fully\r\nscreen them out. But these were just the start of it.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nEventually, people realized that each of these devices could serve as a bit, which was\r\nlabelled an f-bit. And that’s where things exploded. Obviously, there were a few concerns\r\nabout properly miniaturizing the technology, correctly synchronizing the time delay, and\r\nlimiting the interference between them. But these were simply technological challenges,\r\neach wall being taken down successively one after the next.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nAnd from there, each successive use of the technology was similar to those seen in\r\ndigital technology or the internet. First, messages. This allowed someone to send\r\nthemselves a message in the past, or have automated systems that could send back notifications\r\nmore involved than a simple “yes”.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nNext, simple black-and-white images. This obviously also got couple with doorbells,\r\nallowing people to have a general idea of who was going to visit the next day. Sound\r\neventually also made an appearance, covering a gradually large range of sounds. But one\r\nof the big differences between these technologies and some of the digital technologies\r\nis that the storage capacity was already sufficient, but the bandwidth was constant.\r\nTherefore, streaming images or sound was mostly trivial, and the resolution simply\r\ncorresponded to the maximum resolution of a single image, with no worries about f-bit\r\ndrop. The closest to drops that could be encountered being a dead bit.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nSo, how did people use it? The first obvious use was surveillance. Obviously, nothing you\r\nwould see could actually be changed, but you would still have a head-start to deal with\r\naftermath. People started using this for their own homes, and then governments had more\r\ncontemptible means. This also started a new project, which they labelled after classic\r\nscience-fiction, the Minority Report. Although this one felt diverged from its namesake,\r\nonce more because we must consider the deterministic implications of this technology.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nBut is that all? Of course not. People also started to use it for more reliable information.\r\nEarly leaks of information, celebrity sightings, special stock releases, etc…\r\nThe weather forecast also became much more reliable, at least for the next day. And the\r\ndisaster warning system was also implemented, in order to try to limit potential casualties.\r\nBy only getting information about the disaster itself, and not its impact, it was believed\r\nthat we could still limit the damage.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nWith ever-increasing capabilities, the resolution of the information was getting impressive.\r\nIt became extremely easy to get any information ahead of time. Although this also came\r\nwith the potential issue of information corruption through temporal circularity. While\r\nit was generally understood that there was no way to avoid the predicted fate, a new\r\nsyndrome still came about, completely overriding an existing term: The Oedipus Syndrome.\r\nSome people would accidentally see undesirable outcomes, an attempt to prevent them,\r\nthereby fulfilling them.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nSo, with resolution getting to a point where there were only diminishing results. What\r\npeople really wanted now was to extend the actual time buffer. But alas, no progress\r\nseemed to be a hard limit on the actual technology, at roughly 24h50m. Or, at least,\r\nall progress had been gradually approaching it in a seemingly asymptotic. But\r\nthat didn’t discourage people.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nThe first few attempts were simple and manual. They actually came about rather early in.\r\nSomeone would simply be expected to send the information back in time the second the\r\nreceived it. Unfortunately, most of those failed, which was believed to be due to\r\ninformation causality. If you sent it back to yourself, you would be aware of it before\r\nyou were supposed to receive it and send it back to yourself. Thus, these systems were\r\nchanged to isolate both systems, with middling success.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nBut eventually, a proper solution was found by a normal user. Or maybe a hack is a more appropriate\r\nterm. In retrospect, what a simple, and elegant solution. You could simply connect the\r\noutput of one device to the input of the next. If both were at a 24h interval, then\r\nit would be sending information 48h back. That is to say, you would get information 48h\r\nahead of time. Although this approach was not flawless. With each connection, the data\r\ndegraded further. Nothing too surprising there, you get the same with long physical\r\ncables. Still, you could still get about half a week without too much degradation,\r\nwhich was already a great improvement. Gave the first few adopters quite the head-start.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nMeanwhile, the technology race moved to signal strengthening, trying to limit the decay\r\nas much as possible. But how did it affect people and society? Well, it caused excitement\r\nto be completely detached from actual events. People would look into what would happen\r\nweeks before they did, be excited about them, but then move one before they even happened.\r\nA stark exaggeration (or amplification) of a phenomenon that had already been started\r\nin the age of the internet, where important events or news would only be present in the\r\nzeitgeist but for a fraction of time before people moved on to something shinier.\r\n<\/p>
\r\n“And pray-tell, what is life like now, after all these new improvements?”, might you ask?\r\nHonestly, while life did move on, existence have grown startlingly boring. Life feels\r\ndisconnected from anything real, living in the present is a thing of the past, and\r\nmost people have turned into drones, following the predicted path they’ve already observed\r\nfor themselves. But it could be worse, at least life feels safer now.\r\n<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was written December 4th, 2025 F-Bit Technological or societal revolutions leading to existential crises tend to be but a temporary situation, until people have either adapted to it, or natural selection itself deals with the problem. Eventually, humanity just gets used to it, and might even turn it into productive endeavours. The classic dilemma … Continue reading Writing Challenge 2025 \u2013 07 – F-Bit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2486,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2484\/revisions\/2486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}