The Time Traveller’s Strife

Our time machine doesn’t take the form of a Tardis, or DeLorean, yet it does represent an equally large figure in pop culture and science fiction (at least those forced into hard labour on a mining planet colony usually got a spectacular view of the galaxy around them).

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We enter into this system, become largely invisible for a long passage of time, and later exit to a world unprepared for our sudden arrival.

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In the months before I came to prison, a big novelty at the time was an app that could procedurally generate pictures of cats and dogs with often nightmarish results. The output was crude, and looked like a hybrid between a music visualisation and the hallucinations of an android. As someone who grew up with Microsoft Paint, Adobe’s new Content-Aware Fill tool was making Photoshop look like some form of advanced witchcraft.

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Several years later [SpongeBob Voiceover].

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I’m watching a trailer for a film that has been generated entirely through the use of AI, being entered into consideration for an international film festival. I see a short segment on Gruen exposing scam ads on social media, using AI generated video content to market mass-produced mechanically swimming manta ray statues as unique handmade articles. An elderly man cries fake photo-realistic tears as a passer-by at a local market picks up one of his creations and smashes it forcibly into the asphalt.

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It’s hard to see much distinction between these fictitious Black Mirror style dystopian futures, and what I’m seeing daily on the news, and I’m not even halfway through my sentence yet. Will I be granted release before the Morlocks rock up to begin consuming humanity? Have we already become them; hidden out of sight and never spoken of, so that the Elon may peacefully frolic and feast in peace, oblivious of our sporadic excursions into their relative paradise of freedom.

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We share the familiar burden of many a fictional time-travelling compatriot: a painful inability to affect the past, however often we attempt to revisit it. Our actions have consequences; we fork reality with every decision made.

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Learn from the past without getting stuck in it, and focus on a positive future for yourself. Shape your final act, develop the closing chapters of your own story. Reject tragedy as an ultimate certainty, and firmly embrace your destiny.