-- It hit me like a bolt of lightning: This is why they pushed the end of Roe V. Wade.
Always follow the money. It's so obvious I'm ashamed I didn't realize this. Your insight that everybody suing the Sacklers could be underwritten by agents just as morally bankrupt is solid.
-- What happens to a world, I wonder, where every action is designed to take money and life from someone else?
I've wondered this, too. I've long had an idea for a story about parents and kids billing each other for "services rendered", but rounding it out involves more depravity than I'm comfortable with. As you note, that world is pretty much here already.
--For months, I’ve been disgusted with the lack of creativity. It isn’t that AI is “stealing” from our “talented” writers like Stephen King. AI is a mirror. And it doesn’t show a flattering image of human creativity.
Yes! That was a breakthrough for me. Computers are amplifiying mirrors. We hardly use them for computation, but to project ourselves outward. Art does this, too, but the computer has grown to be many times more powerful. And like all things, that power serves the power that's already there. TPTB realized this in the 90s, I think, and understood they had to get this thing under control before there was "too much democracy". And here we are, the internet now reduced to a handful of 'walled gardens', with almost all the rest AI-generated SEO junk.
Thanks for these insights! Nothing is quite what it seems.
Dex, it is a hell of a story - a very dark one - much darker than one we've seen previously from the genuinely pre-internet writers like King and Gibson. The only time I ever got frustrated with Blaylock, whom I love, was when he told me that William Gibson had told HIM that he sold everything he wrote, no rejections, all first time out. Something wrong with that.
-- It hit me like a bolt of lightning: This is why they pushed the end of Roe V. Wade.
Always follow the money. It's so obvious I'm ashamed I didn't realize this. Your insight that everybody suing the Sacklers could be underwritten by agents just as morally bankrupt is solid.
-- What happens to a world, I wonder, where every action is designed to take money and life from someone else?
I've wondered this, too. I've long had an idea for a story about parents and kids billing each other for "services rendered", but rounding it out involves more depravity than I'm comfortable with. As you note, that world is pretty much here already.
--For months, I’ve been disgusted with the lack of creativity. It isn’t that AI is “stealing” from our “talented” writers like Stephen King. AI is a mirror. And it doesn’t show a flattering image of human creativity.
Yes! That was a breakthrough for me. Computers are amplifiying mirrors. We hardly use them for computation, but to project ourselves outward. Art does this, too, but the computer has grown to be many times more powerful. And like all things, that power serves the power that's already there. TPTB realized this in the 90s, I think, and understood they had to get this thing under control before there was "too much democracy". And here we are, the internet now reduced to a handful of 'walled gardens', with almost all the rest AI-generated SEO junk.
Thanks for these insights! Nothing is quite what it seems.
Dex, it is a hell of a story - a very dark one - much darker than one we've seen previously from the genuinely pre-internet writers like King and Gibson. The only time I ever got frustrated with Blaylock, whom I love, was when he told me that William Gibson had told HIM that he sold everything he wrote, no rejections, all first time out. Something wrong with that.
Sure, once you get a name, rejection isn't a problem. I remember Asimov having a similar anecdote, and his shock at receiving a rejection.