“Exploring life through fiction, together.”

I’ve been worrying about Moore’s law a lot recently. Computers and their offspring have warped almost every career, and killed a few. And I’ve been thinking about the Luddites. They were there at the birth of a new technology, they saw the future and chose to fight it. And they lost.

Fiction Bite - Miss this deadline and you’re fired

His eyelids drooped. Their lead-lined folds scoured his sandblasted, over-opened corneas. Just five more minutes. But his hands weren’t listening. Fingers jumped in the wrong order. 9. 6. 5. 5. No, that should be a 4... 6. No. 3. Fuck! 4. Ok, only one more page. But darkness slid and suddenly he was falling. Warm and moving. The crunch of the keyboard didn’t wake him. His mind was far from the flashing cursor.

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Quote of the Week

“Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.”—John Carmack.

Book of the month

The Circuit by Francisco Jiménez (or read the Spanish version, also translated by Jiménez)

Jiménez draws deeply on his childhood as illegal workers migrating across the fields of California. The stories throw blows of despair, paired with glowing joys found amongst terrible conditions. I mourned the conditions we let our fellow humans work in. I marvelled at our resilience to turn strife into fuel for improvement.

Final Words

The AI novel is nearly upon us. They’ve already written convincing poems and songs. Is there still a place for me as a writer if you can click a button and get a customised novel? Ok, we’re not there yet, but I reckon we’re only ten years out. So what do I do? Do I trust that my humanity will give me an edge over the cold machine? That despite their capabilities, if they can’t feel, how can they make us weep? Or do I throw the towel in now? Why waste a decade working on a skill that’s about to become defunct?

What do you think?

With Love,

Josiah

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