I saw a commercial recently where a father is wondering how to get his infant son to eat breakfast, so he asks AI for advice and is told “He likes it when you make silly faces”.
Because this is definitely what we need: to become so brainless and disconnected that we must ask computers how to interact with our own children.
Why stop there? Maybe we can have AI contact our friends with procedurally generated hellos or condolences, freeing up time so we can keep tapping at our glowing phones like a junkie looking for a vein, or like the undead pawing at a mall window. Here’s a fun experiment: the next time you go to a restaurant, park, movie theater, or gym, take note how many people are obsessively glued to their phones; I habitually see entire families sitting around a table, each hypnotized by their own screen. It’s like that episode of Star Trek TNG, where Wesley brings an addictive VR game aboard the Enterprise. What’s darkly amusing is that if anyone was taking a shot of whiskey every five minutes, we’d be quick to say, “That person has a problem.” Yet checking our phones every five minutes gets a free pass.
Between TikTok boiling away attention spans, social media “debate” being little more than a war of red and blue hashtags, and now AI writing our papers (while professors use it to grade them) we’re hurtling straight into becoming barely functioning NPCs in a self-made Matrix. I’ve written before about this, and how we’re at a truly grim cultural crossroads.
The very last thing we need is further disconnection. It was disconnection from humanity that made the title character of H. G. Wells The Invisible Man become a sociopath. It would one thing if we followed that ancient Delphic advice: “Nothing in excess”. Yet that kind of balance and nuance takes effort, and I’m not sure we as a culture are interested in it.
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With the pending release of my newest novel (about zombies and a collapsing world), Baen.com commissioned me to write a short story for their website. I decided to have some fun exploring the possible future of 3D-printing, in a near-future noir thriller titled, appropriately enough, “The Print Job”:
The dead men had printed semi-automatics for their assault on the shop and, from the look of spent casings, must have fired off a thousand cheaply printed bullets. But their target had printed a monster of some kind, and there wasn’t much left of the gunmen by the time Miguel Falcon arrived on the scene…
Set in Astoria, New York, at a time when 3D-printing is used for everything from building construction to the food we put on our plates, this one was as much fun to research as it was to write.