Got a message from someone saying he hoped ChatGPT made it impossible for me to write science fiction.
I don't know if AI writing good science fiction will happen before I die. But odds are pretty good it will happen, at some point.
Your mistake is in thinking my priorities are yours.
I abandoned a writing career more successful than all but a fraction of a percent of all writers ever see, to raise five children, three of them not mine at first. You're an artist? Great, and I wish you well.
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But to quote Archibald Graham:
Ray Kinsella: “Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came within... y-you came this close. It would KILL some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. God, they'd consider it a tragedy.”
Graham: “Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy.”
I brag about my kids a lot. But it was the center of my life. The other day I said to my sister, I felt like my life was over.
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And I don't mean that in any big dramatic way, day by day I'm pretty happy. But the central thing I was put on this world to do, I did. What's left is about my ego, and small by comparison.
I'm broadly in favor of AI. Folks, we've been getting our asses kicked for generations. Oh, liberals have won on all the social issues, and I do mean all of them: we'll win on trans rights eventually.
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Meanwhile billionaires have subverted every government on Earth, either a bit or a lot: your country is Ok? That's because you don't have nukes and the oligarchs aren't focused on you yet. They've taken China and Russia, they've got a firm hold of Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. They've got the US, and they're working hard on Britain and France.
The world is burning around us, Israel has murdered Palestinians by the tens of thousands...
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... Russia murdered Ukrainians by the tens of thousands, and complicit media have done their level best to cover neither crime in any depth.
The idea that there's left media and right media is broadly false.
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CBS? Paramount Global, which is in turn run by National Amusements, which is run by the billionaire Redstone family.
NBC? Owned by Comcast, whose Chairman and CEO, Brian Roberts, is also its principal shareholder and, of course, a billionaire.
ABC? Disney, whose CEO Bob Iger is worth a mere 700 million or so. The company is mostly owned by large financial institutions, with no one institution owning more than 7.5% (Vanguard.) The company itself is worth about 200 billion dollars as of 2024.
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Fox News? The Murdoch Family, of course, with about 20 billion.
And on and on. Truly liberal media exists, sure, and it's poor.
AI (and here I'll use the term the way people who hate it do, without bothering to make nice distinctions -- them because they can't, me because this piece is already too long) ... has a shot at giving us nuclear fusion, which is the one thing that might save this poor world before the massive ecosystem collapse we all see coming arrives.
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(All see coming: oligarchs, too. They just think that they can afford to lose seven billion of you to it.)
AI is going to impact most everything in your life, eventually, for both good and bad: science, medicine, engineering, and in trivial and unimportant ways, art and society.
Today AI is a tool of the wealthy, every way that matters. Oh, you can use ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion, they'll let you, but only because it doesn't threaten them in any way at all.
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But AI will get cheaper. Hardware will get faster. Eventually you'll get open source AI you own helping you instead of AI they own harming you. (Jesus Christ, people, use FOSS. Every dollar you hand the oligarchs who control the large tech corps is used against you.)
Are you under the impression you're doing well? Oligarchs have had it almost wholly their own way since the end of World War II. The Boomers who were going to usher in the Age of Aquarius had their teeth handed to them ...
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every time money was on the line. Gen X? You people voted for Reagan, voted for Trump in greater numbers than Boomers this last election. Millennials, Gen Z? You've grown up in a world where the generations ahead of yours climbed up to security and then pulled the ladder up after themselves.
Hate AI if you like. Rant about the purity of human artistic expression vs what those terrible machines do.
Do you remember midlist? Most of you don't, it collapsed over thirty years ago.
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There used to be quite a lot of middle class writers in this country. There aren't any more, and it's instructive to go look at how that happened, how the oligarchs who ran the publishing companies decided that they could quite do without an artistic middle class.
(There are some middle class artists in the world today. Almost universally they make a living selling books and art on networks built by tech bros.)
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I don't expect this piece to move many people. Photography disrupted painting, and most portrait painters died hating it. Model makers and cel animators hated 3D CGI, film editors hated Premiere. This isn't yet as big a change as that, the best human artists are still better than the best ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion output ... though perhaps not for much longer.
You can't stop this. The oligarchs flat out won't let you: right now this is better for them than for you.
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All you can do, all I've ever been able to do, is face the facts as they are, adjust to the circumstances in front of you, use the tools available, and get on with it.
AI -- local AI, controlled by us and not them -- gives me hope of disrupting the model the oligarchs have settled on, which inevitably results in the deaths of most of the human race, possibly all of it.
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It's not a big hope, the people who should be planning how to use those tools against the oligarchs haven't looked up from their own panic yet.
And might never. Over fifty years now since productivity and compensation separated, with the oligarchs stealing all the benefit from improvements and some of what you had before.
We've been losing for a long, long time.
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@fatsam great thread. I'm a business writer and think AI will eventually do my job but I'll probably be retired by then. I hope it never replaces authors, especially sci-fi, I enjoy knowing a human came up with such weird ideas. I think of AI like a lot of other workplace revolutions like computers that could be beneficial for workers even though they eliminate some jobs. With AI, the problem is that oligarchs will use AI to screw all of us. The other serious problem is how much water and electricity AI requires which will make climate change even worse. It needs to be regulated but I know it won't be, at least not in the US. You're right, it's inevitable.
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@Jennifer The oligarchs will use any automation to screw us. Nonetheless, we need automation.
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@Jennifer The power consumption of AI is mostly a non-issue. It's a trivial portion of the power consumed globally. Much less than 1%.
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@fatsam by 2026, the electricity required for AI is projected to be the same as the entire country of Japan. Hopefully they can refine models to be less power hungry. But fresh water for cooling is the bigger problem, and these concerns are not trivial. In some US cities, the AI industry is starting to suck up water that citizens and farms need. This has been all over the news for ages, this is one of the first articles that came up in my search.
https://www.newsweek.com/why-ai-so-thirsty-data-centers-use-massive-amounts-water-1882374
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@Jennifer what percentage of power consumption, globally, is AI?
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@fatsam Excellent thread. My parents gave me something that says, "Your greatest gift to the world may not be something you do, but someone you raise." Certainly, the best things in my life are my children.
Decades ago, Schumpeter showed that wealth concentrates over time. It's gotten out of control.
You can use AI locally. You can. I can. Many people couldn't. It will still disrupt most industries. Which ones, how and when isn't clear. But yes, the point is to make people expendable.
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@fatsam The oldest Gen Xers were 16 when Reagan was first elected. The youngest were infants. When he was re-elected, only a small percentage of Gen Xers were old enough to vote and we all know what high percentages 18-20 year olds vote in. Not saying Gen Xers are innocent, but very few ever cast a vote for Reagan.
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@PedestrianError I posted this observation on FB, that exact language, twice over the years: once for Boomers and Nixon, once some years later for Xers and Reagan.
I left it in on purpose this post.
The majority of Boomers who could have voted for Nixon did.
The majority of Xers who could have voted for Reagan did.
No one not a Boomer ever yelled about the Nixon observation: but I got dozens from them. Everyone else understood it.
Same deal with Xers and Reagan.
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@fatsam GenX here. Almost all of us were too young to vote for Reagan, don't drag us into that.
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@Jennifer The majority of Xers who voted, voted for Reagan in 1984.
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@fatsam
I think we still had a midlist thirty years ago. The real collapse was in 2008 with the big recession -- that's when I felt it, and I was, save for shared-univese stuff, a solid mid-lister.
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@steveperry numbers I saw had the change starting in the 80s and 90s. I doubt I could find them again at this point, and in broad it doesn't matter.
I don't doubt your experience.
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@fatsam
Well, if we include the studies of the Lancet, we’re in the hundreds of thousands range at this point.
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@GhostOnTheHalfShell I don't know the number either, but it's up there.
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