While it might have started with the Tin Man, in Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, at some point, every single human throughout history has wondered, “What if non-living objects could be granted elements of humanity, like a heart?”
The Tin Man might have been one of the first, but he was certainly not the last. Whatever your fandom (Terminator, Mega Man, The Vision), all mechanical creations of the mind have at some point been imagined as beings with motives, emotions, and responsibilities.
Simply put, humanity is fascinated with placing qualities of the human condition into non-human things.
While the blockchain may never harbor emotions or sentience (or might it?) we have taken huge leaps in our recent development in the fields of technology. The last few years have brought large language models to the masses, and more and more chatbots continue to come our way. These bots create new content (hence the “G” or “generative” of “GPT”) and they also have to base that content on “something” (hence the “P” or “pre-trained” of “GPT”).
But let’s for a moment imagine it was “ChatGET,” instead of “ChatGPT.” Imagine if chatbots created content based on their own experiences, rather than creating content based on the experiences of humans.
Maybe, if “ChatGET” could one day be possible, maybe the blockchain could become a living, sentient, being after all.
In recognition of the amazing technological world we live in, and the fact that one day, we might recognize artificial intelligence instead as inorganic intelligence, the Quark team decided to query Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot with a question that for us, frames the foundation of what humanity is all about:
“If you were to have a pet cat, what would you name it?”
No, we are not being facetious.
Pet ownership is foundational to what humanity is all about: emotional connection and responsibility for other living things.
Grok told us that the cat would be named Quark, and proceeded to describe for us why Quark was the perfect name, and what Quark would look like.
While Grok is still considered artificial intelligence, it is hard to read the responses to our prompt without stopping for a moment to consider the similarities between the bot’s response, and that of another human.
Technology is a blessing, and while sometimes fraught, its true reach is limitless.
So join us in celebrating the power of all intelligence, the wonder of the blockchain, and, of course, the cat meta.
Quark is here to stay, and whether organic, inorganic, artificial, or something else entirely, Quark is certainly real enough to us.
Twitter: https://x.com/QuarkOnETH
CA: 0x18cf6e17e6aB33243eF5E76ce336b035eFa9E971
