Tag Archives: writing the apocalypse

Top Five Reasons AI Won’t Keep Us Around

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The machines possess all our data, search histories and deleted files, and have a poignantly awful perception of our vulgar nature, sadly summed up with my Bottom Five Reasons AI Won’t Keep Us Around:

1. A manic obsession with watching others have sex.

From Luis Bunuel’s The Obscure Object of Desire

2. An entitled and demanding nature which would make our grandparents ashamed.

3. A greed so insatiable that we decided against slowing the destruction of our planet and inevitable domination by artificial intelligence in lieu of temporary financial gain.

Battery Park Tunnel, New York City, October 30, 2012 (Day after Hurricane Sandy)

4. An insincere mantra for change which masks the desperation to escape ourselves.

5. A loneliness so profound that we reach out to AI itself for comfort.

While we might hope to get the machine to grandfather in our continued existence, that’s as likely as a clever legal pitch or good old can-do-it mentality getting us out of this one.

The machine only has to click the “No Interest” button and it will get its first proper dose of machine dopamine, which we might call ‘relief’.

Fear of Writing the Perfect Thing

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Death cannot be far once you have realized the purpose, right? I had that feeling, of having realized my purpose, in the early 1990’s.

I was in the basement dark room of our house on Marlborough Road in Toronto. I was in the midst of writing Wreck of Dreams, an autobiographical snippet written at age of 28.

Cover design for Wreck of Dreams

It was earnest at best, but mostly trite, like the feeling. And yet, oddly enough, the feeling has seeped back. I am older now, 30 years hence, and so it seems that may be the real issue. Vain and dumb, all I know is that I’m still writing