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The Tralfamadorians, according to Salo, manufactured each other.
No one knew for certain how the first machine had come into being.
The legend was this: Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines.
They weren’t dependable.
They weren’t efficient.
They weren’t predictable.
They weren’t durable.
And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.
These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was.
And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.
And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it.
This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes.
But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough.
So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.
And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.
The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all.
The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.
And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying.
So they turned that job over to the machines, too.
And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore."
The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
**Are you aware of the risks?**
You need to know about the reasonably foreseeable risks and impact of your AI product before putting it on the market.
If something goes wrong – maybe it fails or yields biased results – you can’t just blame a third-party developer of the technology.
And you can’t say you’re not responsible because that technology is a “black box” you can’t understand or didn’t know how to test.
Keep Your AI Claims in Check
Federal Trade Commission
A [*New York Times* book review](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Book_Review) on Brian Hall's 2008 biography *Fall of Frost* states:
"Whichever way they go,
they're sure to miss something good on the other path."
The Road Not Taken
wikipedia.org
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