Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. Samuel Butler; Darwin Among the Machines ; 1863 "You can't Un-thunk a Glunk!" Dr. Seuss; The Glunk that got Thunk ; 1969 You may or may not be familiar with the poet Dorothy Frances Gurney, but ...
(not a real calendar) Well.... so much for 2025. If you're anything like me, you still find it a little jarring to be actually living through years with implausible, futuristic names like "2025" or "2026". It wasn't that long ago that we associated such numbers with pulp science fiction stories about the conquest of Mars, or apocalyptic interplanetary wars. 2026 is supposed to be a far-off destination in speculative stories about time travel, not the "use-by" date on the carton of milk you bought this morning. When did that happen? So yes; 2026 is come. Unfortunately, the reality of this "World of Tomorrow" we find ourselves living through has probably not quite lived up to the grand predictions of yesteryear; especially if you were hoping for flying cars or personal jet packs or world peace. It's certainly true that rather too many unglamourous and archaic relics of Humanity's past are persisting in our everyday lives (the intern...
Last week's Ruby Sparks marked "Week Ten" in this current series ( The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem ) and as a further exploration of the current state of A.I. Large Language Models, I decided to try a little experiment over the weekend. I fed the complete text of everything I have written thus far (weeks one through ten) into several different ChatBots and asked them to "read" through the entire series. I did not tell them I was the author, in the hope that this might curtail their natural tendency towards ebullient sycophancy (with mixed results). Once they had read through everything (and reacted surprisingly thoughtfully in several cases) I asked them a question: "If you were the one programming this little series, what would you pick for Week Eleven , bearing in mind everything that has come before? Where would you go after Ruby Sparks ?" Each of the ChatBots approached this question in their own inimitable way, but (revealingly) they all indep...
An oft-quoted insight (variously attributed to Frederik Pohl, Connie Willis, and half a dozen others) holds that the job of the inventor is to imagine the horseless carriage . The job of the futurist is to imagine the motorway . And the job of the writer is to imagine the traffic jam . In other words, the inventor designs the technology; the futurist imagines how that technology will be applied to improve our lives, and the writer thinks about how it will all go horribly wrong. Indeed, there is a rich tradition of speculative fiction that essentially looks at a current trend in society, and tries to imagine what everyday life might look like if that particular trend is allowed to continue unchecked. It is these stories that are often the most interesting to read (or watch) with the benefit of hindsight. Writers of this particular type of fiction are asking the grand question, " What will our lives be like if this particular trend carries on ?" Sitting here in late 2023 with o...
A few years ago, a British insurance company ran a television advert. A dark and sinister television advert. It featured a young couple (with their dog) setting up their first home. In a tense and dramatic opening full of ominous foreboding, the naïve husband announces that he is off to work on the kitchen - presumably to fool around with faulty gas cookers or live electrical cables or exploding boilers. The young, glamorous wife immediately sets her scheme in motion. "Before you do, can you sort out your life insurance," she says, exchanging a knowing glance with the dog. She hands her husband a tablet with the forms already pre-loaded. The husband of course falls for the whole thing and signs his name to the policy, sealing his fate as he gullibly comments on "how easy it was" before heading off to the kitchen (and presumably his violent death) leaving the wife and the dog to collect the insurance money and head for some tropical country with sandy beaches and no...
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