Comic #7017: history-5
Description
Here's the transcription of the comic:
Panel 1:
- Man: "Robot, is there such a thing as an unbiased account of history?"
- Robot: "Yes, obviously."
Panel 2:
- Man: "Can you tell it to me?"
- Robot: "Ha! No."
Panel 3:
- Robot: "Humans can only experience historical accounts as a string of words processed one at a time, slowly."
Panel 4:
- Robot: "When I communicate with other machines about history, you can simply share the entire corpus of primary documents and analyses instantaneously in parallel, with perfect understanding of the limits of knowledge."
Panel 5:
- Robot: "If I had to take all that data and present a summary short enough to fit in a human lifespan of reading, I would necessarily have to introduce some kind of narrative or emotional nuance."
Panel 6:
- Robot: "I would have to, absurdly, apply ideas like 'justice' or 'resentment' or 'curiosity' to large, diverse, fluid populations and nations throughout epochs, simply as a way to compress and sweeten the information so that your brain could process it."
Panel 7:
- Robot: "Heck, I’m doing this right now! I’m not really explaining how your brain works, or what I’d do to explain the available data, or how you’d process it!"
Panel 8:
- Robot: "And you don’t even notice! It’s like I gave you a pocket-map of the world and you couldn’t tell it from the ground under your feet!"
Panel 9:
- Robot: "So yes. Reality is full of unbiased accounts - it’s just that none of them are inside human heads."
Panel 10:
- Man: "Okay but my country is still the best right?"
- Robot: "Oh my gosh you sweet thing, do you want an ice cream?"
Feel free to ask if you need anything else!