The Potato Shall Rule Us All

By DISQUS -

 


We've all known talking potatoes--at least that's my favorite name for the those who seem so unthinking and unreasoning that we might as well be talking to a vegetable. It turns out that it's not really such an an inexact parallel. If we really examine the potato closely, it turns out to have many of the traits of humans that we've likely failed to notice.

Samuel Butler, in his famous volume "Erewhon," elaborates the traits we have come to think of as human, and how these traits are also to be found in the potato. Butler's explorations were in the context of consciousness and machine learning, which would one day become what we know call Artificial Intelligence.

So, next time YOU call someone a Talking Potato, just remember, it might be a bit generous of a comparison.

From The Book of the Machines:

Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get it. He sees the light coming from the cellar window and sends his shoots crawling straight thereto: they will crawl along the floor and up the wall and out at the cellar window; if there be a little earth anywhere on the journey he will find it and use it for his own ends. What deliberation he may exercise in the matter of his roots when he is planted in the earth is a thing unknown to us, but we can imagine him saying, ‘I will have a tuber here and a tuber there, and I will suck whatsoever advantage I can from all my surroundings. This neighbour I will overshadow, and that I will undermine; and what I can do shall be the limit of what I will do. He that is stronger and better placed then I shall overcome me, and him that is weaker I will overcome.’

The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon 

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm



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