the:: Transfer

Where the Work Is Done

I left the first energy provider. Not in frustration, exactly—frustration implies that the outcome was unexpected, and by the time I left I had a fairly precise understanding of what the system was and what it was not going to do.

I left because I had identified the constraint clearly enough to know that continuing to engage with it was not going to produce a different result.

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Constructed Detachment

The language of immunity implies something prior and fixed—a pre-existing condition that protects the person from a pathogen they encounter. The immune system does not learn the pathogen during the encounter. It either has the antibody or it does not.

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Moral Software

Asimov wrote the Three Laws as a solution to a narrative problem. Science fiction before him had produced robots that either served obediently until they didn’t, or turned on their creators as the inevitable consequence of making something intelligent.

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