Ok. So bear with me on this one. Grr...! Homer Simpson is John Galt from Atlas Shrugged. What the show does is that every week it picks a funny thing or a story that happened to a typical American family (2.5 kids, white picket fence - the prototypical family life) and then features it on the show. What's more is that it selectively prefers people that have good ideas, sociological or otherwise, that there are to share - sometimes it pulls ideas from history that should have happened, but didn't. All of these links and how I'm being screwed with with douchebag homeless having monopoly money and shit like that is that they're upset that they can't make a fictionalized "self" to come up with a bunch of good ideas - it's a commie anarcho communist we're all equal and in this together shit. Another "John Galt" character is Thomas Pynchon and (probably) Elon Musk. They're semi-famous people that a bunch of other people give ideas too - most of their stuff is probably ghost written. But the genius of the Simpsons is that you mask the entire thing in this conceit of a cartoon so it's not even a real person.

I'll give you one example and then once you see it you'll be hooked looking through all of the Simpsons looking for the esoteric stuff where they're saying that the main character is an idiot, but secretly he's stumbled onto something important or the show is telling you a secret you hadn't thought of. This follows one of my philosophical conceits that comedy is one of the most important vehicles for truth, even truths you don't like (or are particularly good). Ok, so there's this episode called "Homer's Enemy" where the bad guy looks a bit like the character from Falling Down. The point is that Homer is lazy and the other guy has a hard work ethic and everyone hates him. (I'm surrounded by the same shit, except people here have forgotten how to use money, shut up). Anyway, the point of the episode is a morality lesson in laziness. Homer designs a nuclear power plant that wins the contest for a "children design a nuclear power plant" thing because Lisa didn't want to enter (or something).

Now check out this proposed nuclear power plant for an inherently safe nuclear power plant *from 1989*. The key here is that the reactor uses gravity to have the control rods fall out or overpressurization of the reactor core to blow a gasket and make the rods fall out (it doesn't use rods but you get the idea). It's inherently save because it's failsafe methods are based on gravity or the pressurization of the reactor core. And it's nicknamed "PIUS" and Homer is in fact a pius everyman as every show is essentially a morality lesson on the importance of family, no matter how much he hates Ned Flanders. The point here is that we could have had this reactor design 50 years ago, but don't. Probably because the French gave Africa well...french...and they control the supply of large amounts of biological weapons. And they supply all of the nuclear power in Europe. And they don't like competition. I mean that's a theory, but it gives everyone another reason to hate the French other than their amazing wine and bread (German bread is better). I'll give them Moebius though. And the fifth element, which comes from them. Seriously we're going to need French engineers if we're going to make a shit ton of modular reactors so skip it.

Let's say for the moment that, regardless of the merits of the PIUS reactor or the geopolitical implications you buy the premise that there's a connection betwen the television show and this Simpson's episode. That means that *every Simpson's show may be a hidden good idea in science that no one knows or talks about*. And now we have the largest cross referencing machines (AI) on the planet to compare them all and find what the ideas are.

There are goods and bads in this admittedly. Let's say you buy the above idea. Then it becomes harder to hide subtext in art in the first place and so art itself becomes a battleground that has to hide from the machines that will look for subtext and mine any good idea they find. This is a subset of the paperclip maximization problem excepting as a cultural one. This goes back to my idea of noblesse oblige which is the following. Let's say that you happen to have an AI that mines this information from artists. Then you have some obligation to use the mined information to make art where such ideas can be hidden as subtext in the future more possible rather than less as you've found a tragedy of the commons situation. This doesn't just mean more privacy in people's lives, it means making weird art that inspires people to do weird shit easier. I'll give an example. If you find ways to make energy free or nearly so then you should be using that to make artificial rainforests in deserts or West World but you know not tragic theme parks where people can make art or do weird things (albeit in a way that doesn't get people killed or maimed). Then you're still satisfying the social contract in such a way that more art will be made. One weird thing you could do (which I'll add to the architecture section in a moment) is you could convert abandoned underground salt mines into places where you can have art or do weird shit like this.

Bizarre no?