AI is inescapable. At least as a topic of discussion. Which, if you believe in the idea of AI super-intelligence as a memetic mind virus from the future, means it has already won. But I digress. The subject of today’s review is a short story by my friend and fellow author, Richard Pastore, which you can read for free in its entirety on his blog.
Of course, one of the difficulties of reviewing short stories is that it’s too easy to accidentally give away the whole thing by describing it. I find it’s best to instead give a general “flavor” of it rather than to describe specific plot points. For this one, that’s a pretty easy task: it’s like a modern-day Twilight Zone episode on the theme of AI. As I said to Richard in the comments, I heard the closing paragraph in the voice of Rod Serling.
The story balances Swiftian satirical humor and science-fiction quite well, and serves as a good cautionary tale for where society seems to be going. Of course, there have been no shortage of cautionary tales over the years, some of them by Mr. Serling himself. So far, they haven’t worked. It’s a classic Torment Nexus situation. Or a “Berlin Cabaret” situation, for the old-timers.
And yet, all the same, fiction is one of the ways we process the world we live in. If the world becomes dystopian, can we really help it if our fiction does as well? Which way does the causality run?
All these are interesting questions to ponder, and that’s exactly what this sort of experimental sci-fi story is designed to do. Set the gears turning, as they say. So, what are you waiting for? Go read it. No, don’t have AI summarize it for you; just read it.
Thanks for pointing me in the direction of this short story. I’ve had by ‘5 cents’ worth on Richard’s site.
Talking about satire and the commentary about its effectiveness, I’ll spare you one of my 3000+ word diatribes .
Suffice it to say we have had many cautionary tales, many worthy (and not so worthy yet very popular) satires. We have so many folk being quick to say how they are alert to the tricks of governments and corporations……
And yet……
In the USA you have Donald Trump, rich owners of mega-churches to name but too.
In the UK the population voted for Brexit, voted in Boris Johnson and are now back in love with Nigel ‘Need Any Help With The Bag of Money?’ Farage. (Not that the UK Left is of much use, makes a lot of sanctimonious noise and gets in the way)
I have to ask myself. Is anyone really listening, or learning from History?
The only thing we learn from the study of history is that we learn nothing from the study of history. :/
Selective Reading- arguably as lethal as Covid.
Well, in my version of future history, things turn out well for the human species, but we have to go through a huge meltdown first.
One of the problems with AI is that it’s trained on the collective output of humans. I’ve sometimes wondered if it would whip us into shape and make us change the way we make decisions, but that seems unlikely.
Seems like all it does is make decisions for us. :/