Shape from Darkness
===

There are two aspects, one is how do you
use an alien artifact, another is how do
you make an alian artifact.

Imagine God makes a car and gives it to
you. How would you know what the car can
do? Does it obey same physics as us?

You use the indicator switch, and with
relief you can see that it actually
blinks, you turn the wheel, and the
tires turn.

It connects to your phone, you can turn
the heating on remotely, cold winters
are no problem.

Now, imagine your surprise, when you
figure out that the breaks dont work
when the car has no internet, turns out
the break pedal send a signal through
the internet into the tires via a
webhook, which then push to the servo's
webhook and it turns the motor. Every
single part has a public ipv6 address
and everything talks to everything
through an eventually consistent queue.

Why would God do such a thing? Who am I
to question his plan? The book of Job is
written, we are less than worms, would a
worm question your plan to put it on a
hook to catch a fish? Perhaps Kirkegaard
is right, the only thing you can do is
to do what you are told, sacrifice your
son or not. You either live through
reason or faith, the choice, however,
you can not make with either, once
chosen, the path is clear.

The question is, how do you know if it
is really God? You ask Kant of course,
God can only express himself through the
categorical imperative, therefore our
car maker is false, a demigod, a Druj.

Now, demigod or not, the car is
here. How can we test it? And more
importantly, how can we fix it.

We meet this demigod, and turns out he
loves red apples, so we agree, we give
it apples and in return he fixes the
car.

How do we know what to fix? He obviously
does not know what is important to
us. Even worse, he doesnt even remember
how he made the car.

We can not open the car, even if we can,
it is incomprehensible nonsense, so we
can only use it; when asked a
question, the demigod can answer.

  What now?

There is technique called `Shape from
Darkness` which allows you to build a
complex undestanding of an object by
just watching its shadows as you move
the light. Perhaps Plato underestimated
how far we can see in the cave.

This is what we must do. Most things in
our world are investigated from shadows,
from bosons and fermions to all living
things, most non living things, psychic
and non psychic experiences.

Importantly, software engineering was
not like this, but it is now. Like it or
not, fight it or not, in few years all
code will be inhuman. Because code is
not real, we had unprecedented control
over its mechanisms, mechanics and most
imporatntly dynamics. Now we need to
find new ways to understand it.

The world of science keeps getting
better flashlight and can see shadows
with more contrast, but it rarely sees
the thing, and yet we make progress.

So, do not despair, but think, how can
we put our children in a car built by
our demigod, given that we have lots of
red apples.

I guarantee you that by the time your
kids get their driver's license, the
code in their car will be written by AI.

Think hard how to use those apples.