These would blossom in my grandparents’ yard around New Year. It’s the first sign of the coming spring to me.
Snowflakes
A short story about our AI-assisted future
The WordPress.com Reader found me this story from 2023 on a site with almost no visitors. It imagines a utopia where AI does almost all the work except for some. Like Human Resources. Why is that spared? Check the story.
I don’t believe the current boom in generative AI will push us toward UBI, but it is important to imagine the threads of the future and see what we like and what we don’t so we can act accordingly.
Analog poster
This poster is almost graffiti art. Also shows what we lose with computer-assisted creativity.
The Temple of Gold by William Goldman
I got to this book by pure randomness, using a random book finder. I had no clue it existed before the tool suggested it. My wish was to read something different and with more life in it. The last 2 books I finished were quite grim and had nearly identical serial killers. So here we are – by an act of luck, I got into this strange little world that was so wow.
The Temple of Gold has many beginnings, a little forgiveness, and fewer ends. It feels like a condensed version of the drama of an entire high school from the 1950s plus a spice of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. It is a mess of the kind that could happen and probably happens here and there, often in young people’s imagination or old people’s fears. The main character is not kind or even likable but despite that, the story is so well written and human that I went from start to finish in one try and enjoyed it.
Wikipedia says that when Goldman was in his early 20s, he got rejected by publishers for other work with “We can’t possibly publish this shit.” It’s quite an improvement to go from low-quality stories to world-class writing in less than 5 years. Overall, very happy with the randomizer, it could’ve suggested his prior work 😁
My next book will also not feature a serial killer.
Daily dose of AI
Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’
I can foresee that the “Nigerian Prince” and “We are calling from the bank” enterprises may get fully automated, pushing ordinary criminal copywriters and call centers in impoverished areas out of business. Shall I be rooting for the humans or the AI in that area? Not sure.
Watching how this cluster of unintelligent technologies impacts us is a bit like watching the end of Fight Club in very slow motion. I keep blogging that generative AI is a form automation that by intent or accident tends to steal content and traffic from human content creators, and I hope enough others speak about it so that it’s heard. This can replace the genuine information with fakes and hallucinations, embedded with the search engines and social media.
What can we do? Blog more. Influence a regulatory change.
Blogging and writing will keep the momentum of human expression, even if it also trains the bots.
