Odd O'blography

RIP Puny Humans

I grew up among vacuum tubes and rotary dial phones. I got my first pocket calculator while I was still in high school and bought my first personal computer in 1984. I watched CB radio fade away as email and texting became basic utilities. I've embraced the internet, smart phones, and learned how to waste time doom-scrolling instead of playing solitaire. Change is simply a fact of modern life, but it seems to be speeding up. Changes that once felt like dominos toppling now feel like parallel processes in a multi-core CPU. So, in that vein, here are some parallel posts on the subject of Artificial Intelligence:

The era of human writing is drawing to a close. Why should an author toil for months in the harsh glare of a laptop screen? Why rub their fingers raw scraping content from an unforgiving keyboard? An AI writing program can produce the bulk of a novel in minutes, and the author can complete it and send it to the publisher in a few days.

The era of publishing human writers is drawing to a close. Why should an editor wade through a slush pile of dreck to find a hidden gem? Why gamble an advance in hope of a best seller? Why beg and plead with human authors to meet a deadline? A minimum-wage intern can feed buzzwords to an AI writing program and produce a novel in minutes. Add a cursory polish and the book is ready for market in a couple of days.

The era of buying books from a publisher is drawing to a close. Why pick through a limited selection that someone else chooses for you? Why bother with unreliable reviews? Why waste time starting a book that you may not enjoy or even finish? Why take the risk of being 'triggered' by disturbing content? An AI writing program can produce a novel that's custom tailored to your individual tastes and interests in real time.

The era of human blogging is coming to a close. Why wait thirty agonizing minutes for the peck, peck, peck of fingers hunting out seeds of wisdom among the keycaps? An AI writing program can post a clever observation, complete with snarky replies, in seconds.

The era of human reading is drawing to a close. Why subject the perfection of AI prose to the fallible judgment of humankind? The visual intake of printed text is an uncertain process at best. Defects in the human eye may cause transcription errors and defects in the human brain may result in 'seeing' content that doesn't exist. An AI program is far better suited to evaluate AI writing than any human ever could be.

And the snowball is already rolling downhill . . .