Author: admin

It’s weird to realize that two years ago today an armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol Building, at the urging of the President of the United States, because they didn’t like how the presidential election turned out. And it’s even weirder to realize that the President of the United States wanted to join them.

If that hadn’t happened, and I were to write that into the plot of a novel, I suspect that readers would shake their heads in disbelief. After all, my readers would probably think, no President with an ounce of integrity would even think of doing something like that.

Oh, right.

The greatest gift you can give someone is to become the person they always believed you could be.

The recent adaptation of the 1988 fantasy film Willow into a TV series has a lot going for it. In the process it has been from translated from the original English into Millenial-speak, which can be jarring, but also kind of fun.

The show contains lots of cool Easter eggs. I like the fact that one of the main characters is named Boorman — a plausibly Tolkienesque name, but also a clear reference to the great film director John Boorman, who once upon a time brought us Excalibur, The Emerald Forest and other movies that are clear influences on the current series.

But there is one place where I feel that they jumped the shark on the easter egg front. At one point a character refers to a “Fibonacci hex”.

It’s one thing to do winking shout outs to relevant filmmakers. It’s another thing entirely to randomly insert the names of actual historical figures from our own world.

That moment yanked me clear out of the fantasy universe. It was as though a great wizard suddenly appeared named Thomas Jefferson.

As George Santos heads to Washington D.C. today to be sworn in, I can’t help thinking about the parallels. Here is somebody who speaks with a voice of authority, yet pretty much just makes everything up.

He is a college graduate who never graduated from college, a Jew who is Catholic, a proudly out gay man who forgot to mention he had been married to a woman, a property owner who doesn’t own property, a generous giver to charity who doesn’t give to charity. He is a self-proclaimed law abiding citizen who is being investigated for crimes in several countries.

Despite all this, the man is now blithely traveling to our nation’s Capital to be sworn in as our Nation’s representative from New York’s 3rd congressional district. He doesn’t seem to see a problem with the fact that his entire election campaign was based on a fictional construct.

This is pretty much what we expect from ChatGPT. When you ask it a question, it speaks with an uncannily impressive voice of authority. Yet if it doesn’t have an accurate answer for you, it will just make stuff up.

How long will it be before we elect a well-trained chatbot for President? And after we do, will anybody really notice?

When I was around 13 years old, I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Well, “read” is not exactly the right word. More like devoured.

I loved all things Asimov in that phase of my life, and I couldn’t get enough of his voluminous offerings. Nightfall, the robot stories, The Gods Themselves, The End of Eternity. Whatever it was, I read it.

I spent many joyful hours in my youth pondering the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline. I would happily design experiments in my head based on that one simple impossible hypothesis.

But the Foundation trilogy was my go-to. And then I grew up, and for a while I forgot about the trilogy.

Until one day, many years later, I picked it up and read it again. This time I read with trepidation. After all, most of my adult re-readings of childhood science fiction turned out rather badly.

For example, I was horrified, as my adult self, upon rereading Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. That beloved novel from my teenage years turned out to be filled with misogyny, racist assumptions, and all sorts of attitudes that I now found unsettling.

But to my delight, Foundation was an even better read as an adult than it had been when I was a teenager. The epic sweep, the original ideas, the sheer intelligence of it all, was even more thrilling to my adult self.

So I’d just like to take a moment today to wish Isaac Asimov a very happy 102 birthday.

Happy 10*98-7*6+543*2-1

Now that A.I.s are able to make every movie
The films that we get are so wonderfully groovy

Stable Diffusion recycles each tale
A font of profusion that simply can’t fail

You can even decide on the cast of your choice
If you want you can choose any face, any voice

Sourced from the Crowd, and crunched in the Cloud
These movies are great, and we’re so very proud

And yet even now the fond memory lingers
Of when actors had always exactly ten fingers

Sometimes your demo code works right away. Other times it can take a solid week of hacking. And then there are those times when you encounter a demo that takes a year or so to finally work.

The first kind is very easy. The second kind is challenging. The third is very very frustrating.

Today I finally succeeded getting a demo of the third kind to work. It’s been a long haul, and I had been starting to suspect that this day would never come.

I think I’ll take the evening off now and watch an old Spielberg movie. Maybe something with mashed potatoes.

While we’re on the subject of chatbots, suppose we extrapolate into the future the ability of people to ask questions of computers, and to get meaningful answers. In the end, what does it all lead to?

My favorite answer to this we given by Isaac Asimov way back in 1956. I read his story >The Last Question when I was just a kid, and it has stayed with me.

The answer is unexpected, yet somehow makes perfect sense. The sign of a great science fiction mind.

The hype about ChatGPT has a lot of people thinking about a future in which we talk to computers, and they talk back to us. But what if we have the paradigm wrong?

Maybe the better future is not one where we talk to computers, but where we use computer assistance to talk with each other better. This is pretty much the opposite vision, although it would make use of the same technological advances.

Think about it. Why spend your time talking to a computer, when instead you can be talking with another human being?