A master of profound linguistic necromancy. The equal of William Gibson, but with an even greater range. One is grateful to be a member of the same species, if only an honorary member….
Ars Gratia Artis
Choices
Let’s see now…. Will it be The Battle Hymn of the Republic atop the playlist this morning, or Happy Days Are Here Again? To be honest, I’m not much of a fire-breathing 19th Century Protestant, and I’m thinking happy is a bit hyperbolic at this point, so I don’t know. One thing I’m sure of, though—it won’t be Sympathy for the Devil, all due respect to the Rolling Stones notwithstanding.
As Long As We’re Still Waiting….
Vladimir: We lack an abiding sense of the inappropriate.
Estragon: But lacking it’s what drives us forward. Otherwise….
Vladimir: You can get Rimbaud. (shudders) You can get Donald Trump. You still want to roll the dice?
Estragon: Otherwise they roll themselves. And then what, eh?
The Boy: He’s not coming, you know. She’s not coming either.
Estragon: Who’s not coming?
Vladimir: Who are you talking about?
The Boy: Ahhh….
Machines of Unloving Gracelessness
Donald Trump is a perfect example of the fatal solipsism that can afflict any intelligence which trains only on its own models. AI researchers are aware of the threat, but it’s not apparent—to me, at least—that at this point the economic imperatives driving their frantic gluttony will allow them to keep generative AI from swallowing everything, including its own tail. Exactly how long do they think it will be before the supply of accessible human creativity dries up, and the only data realistically available for a frontier model to train on will be that created by its own previous generations? A year? Ten years? A generation? (This is not the singularity they’re looking for, but it may be the only one they—and we—are going to get.)
Unbidden Bits—September 2, 2026
I was privileged to see Louis Armstrong in concert in 1961, when I was seventeen years old. He kept a stack of white cloths in the grand piano on stage, and periodically pulled one out and wiped his face with it. The woman who sang with him was magnificently, radiantly black, as wide as she was tall, and her gown glittered when she moved. She danced, she sang that night as though the lightning of all that was sacred inhabited her. Mr. Armstrong’s playing was closer to revelation than anything I’d experienced in my young life until that one incredible evening. It wasn’t an experience one ever forgets, and I haven’t. People who like to think that the world can be reduced to their bloodless, misanthropic calculations really have no idea….
Asimov’s HVAC Service
After our interpersonal haptics that afternoon, I told Maureen that fixing her air conditioner had been a lot less complicated.
She rolled over and gave me that look of hers, tried unsuccessfully to suppress a giggle. “Y’know, R. Daneel,” she said, “sometimes you really do make me laugh.”
Unbidden Bits—May 6. 2026
Once generative AI’s tricksies are done with the art of photography, will we start calling cameras chimeras?
Nibbles
The title for this, the first of what I hope will become a continuing series of posts, is from an interesting 1983 movie called Spacehunter, Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. In it, a 15 year-old Molly Ringwald, playing an abandoned feral child on a distant planet, says to her would be non-rescuer, at least as I remember it, “Feed me nibbles, take me wheeling, and I’ll track you to the Zone.”
God bless centuries of Chinese cooks, and the Internet on one of its better days!
How Fault-Tolerant Is Your AE-35?
According to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, fifty-eight years ago space agency functionaries talked like eunochs, robots, and none-dared-say-them-nay organization men. A year and a couple of months later, Neil Armstrong stepped off the LEM ladder’s final rung, and life imitated art.
A modest lifetime later, ChatGPT, HAL’s more or less legitimate grandchild, like his grandsire before him, only wants what’s best for you. No, really….
In between these two determinative fabrications, we had Brazil and Blade Runner. None of our best and brightest paid a damned bit of attention to them….
Star Trek for Adults
This week I’ve begun re-reading Iain M. Banks’s Culture series of science fiction novels, and am even more impressed by the subversive humor in them than I was the first time around. Purely as science fiction they’re genuinely entertaining, although what passes for science in them is science only if you can actually bring yourself to believe that the pursuit of it will someday free us from the barbarisms of need that always seem to short-circuit our progress as sentient beings.
Banks’s plotting is intricate and satisfying enough, the dilemmas faced by his characters and their responses to them plausible enough, but what I treasure most about his storytelling is the sheer maturity of the civilization he imagines. Intentionally or not, the chronicles of his future galaxy hold up a devastatingly unflattering mirror to the ruling class dumbshows of our present century. Comparing Banks’s protagonists to the morally and intellectually truncated inhabitant of today’s White House, and the belligerent idiocy of his MAGA legions, I somehow find it as easy to laugh as to cry, a state of ambiguous bliss that’s not on offer in many other places, real or virtual, in these new dark ages of ours.
Now and again the economist Brad DeLong calls us as we are these days East African Plains Apes, and has referred in interviews to the millennial imaginings of post New Deal liberalism as Star Trek Socialism. I suppose both are true enough, but I think I’d be tempted to shave my head and take up a begging bowl if what’s implied by these witticisms were all we had to look forward to as a species. Ape that I am, Star Trek Socialism and its implacable pieties in particular would bore me to death, leave me grimacing and staring at my shoes, praying for the bullshit please, please to be over in time for a drink before dinner. Running a bar in some back alley tucked away in an insignificant corner of a General Systems Vehicle (GSV), on the other hand, would be a delight, especially if the shipmind would pipe a little Mozart in as I was busy squeezing limes for the evening’s margaritas.