The Electric Monk is a character introduced by Douglas Adams in his 1987 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The Monk is a machine intelligence in the service of an alien who visits Earth before life as we know it arose here. It probably looked like Julian Glover wearing an unconvincing rubber mask. It was about as diligent as a human.
The alien had a problem. Its ship – shamelessly copied from the Dr Who serial City of Death – was then about as reliable as SpaceX Starship. The normal rockets were not functioning. But the alien decided that a tech-hack might work. It would take off on Warp Drive. From a planetary surface. With no Tech Support.
Now before SF fans choke on their pints of Dow Bridge Centurion (4.0 per cent), pause for a bit. It was desperate and there was some oppression stuff and illiberal anti-democratic stuff needing doing out in the galaxy. It possibly had a PPE degree, and was used to trading off risk. Or at least closing the agenda. Naturally it could inspect the Warp Drive itself. But what a faff!
This is where the Electric Monk came in. The alien’s people had invented these MI when they wanted reassurance about things, without being diligent about things, or – by crikey – sweating the detail. So the alien asked the Monk to check the Warp Drive. The Monk assured the alien that all was well. Which is about as useful as a ferry safety check conducted by Chris Grayling and the SNP.
Chop chop. Switches on, batteries to power, warp to speed, retract landing legs. Boom.
End of alien. Normal life starts on Earth. Here we are. Then we invent GPT.
We now have something that will draft that conference speech for you. And check it. And do a schedule. And reassure you that the speech will be fine. Even accept that minor correction you made. Progress. Which is a term seldom heard in Market Harborough.
The line "Sometimes you have to roll the hard six" occurs in episode 1.10 of the 2004 American SF series Battlestar Galactica, which is titled The Hand of God.
Edward James Olmos plays Commander Adama, Mary McDonnell plays President Laura Roslin, Katee Sackhoff plays Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, and Jamie Bamber tries to play Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama. The Executive Producer (lead writer) was Ron D. Moore. Ron used a team writing approach, and his writers bible included portraying the BSG as a USN carrier and the convention that those enemies of humanity, the Cylons, were monotheists. The Cylons know who created them, so surely the whole world was a creation?
The situation in 1.10 is desperate. The human fleet is very low on fuel. They either land on a planet or find some fuel or fuel ore. A scout locates a defended enemy base with a fuel refinery. The Commander and his pilots draft a plan to take the enemy base. It is high-risk, high-reward. There will be losses of irreplaceable pilots and machines, including civilian freighters. They take the plan to the political administration. President Roslin listens:
Adama: If you keep running from the school-yard bully he keeps on chasing you, but the moment you turn around and stop and you punch him really hard in a sensitive spot, he'll think twice about coming back again.
So it's either this, or run out of fuel and be annihilated. Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.
Roslin: Well the Freighters are yours. Good hunting.
You can watch this scene online.
The term "hard six" originates in the dice game craps. There it means a pair of threes on two dice. The probability is 1 in 36, which is 2.777 recurring percent. The payoff is high. It would have to be in an episode where a good outcome is moderate losses of irreplaceable people. The payoff would have to change the game.
There follows some well scripted action involving the "which hand is the ball in?" subterfuge with large explosions and dead AI. Which was the point of the episode in series one.
This is all easy to do in a scripted drama. It is routinely used by hacks. Ron D. Moore used it this once in series one.
In real life, with limited uncertain information, it may still have to happen. Contemporaries say that Operation Market Garden fell into that category. It was said to be worth the risk at the time. Later historians and writers endlessly second-guess that.
And what for the Lib Dems in 2019? There was a lack of solid information, high risk, possible high reward. But it did not work. Sometimes it does not. Was it right?
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