Paul Whybrow
Full Member
This disturbing story from the Daily Mail is about how researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised software that can write stories:
Shelley the AI horror writer that pens hair-raising tales | Daily Mail Online
It's disturbing, only if you think about the implications—which most people won't, as it's just another app for them to play with on their iPhone. I'm bothered by it because so many jobs are being taken over by computers and robots. It's easy to look at these changes as being proof that 19th and 20th-century fantasy and science-fiction writing was somehow true—and isn't that fun because it's all been done without the nasty and violent drawbacks?
Granted, there are some perilous jobs that drones and robots do more efficiently and with no risk to human life—tasks such as delivering medicine to remote communities stricken with natural disaster, searching for survivors of earthquakes, examining and carrying out controlled explosions on bombs and even mechanised killing machines, along the lines of those predicted in the Terminator films.
Robots have long been used in factories, to make such things as automobiles that require accurate and repetitive assembly. I wonder how many workers have been laid off as a result of this...Back in the 19th-century, with the Industrial Revolution and an increase in mechanisation, traditional hand workers protested the changes that were throwing them aside. The Luddites were English textile workers who destroyed weaving machines. The term has entered the language to describe those opposed to technology replacing human beings. Sabotage has dodgier origins as a term used for deliberate destruction of property, though the image of disgruntled workers throwing their wooden clogs, called sabots, into machines is pleasing.
These days, I guess the best way to screw up the system would be to engineer a power-cut, infect a network with a virus or simply pour water onto the motherboards!
It's comforting to think, that we as creative writers are unique and inimitable, but a truism in life is that no one is irreplaceable. Already, people accept that whatever Google tells them is irrefutably correct—few people think for themselves anymore—they merely want a quick answer.
The idea that readers will turn to stories created for them by a machine—and with their input—isn't far-fetched these days. Just look at how common the use of Computer Generated Imagery is in movies and the way that pop singers have their inadequate voices corrected by Auto-Tune.
It's predicted that holograms will appear instead of musicians at concerts. Missed your favourite singer before he died? No problem, watch their hologram perform.
Rock star Ronnie James Dio set for world tour – despite having died in 2010
No one knows what's real these days, and no one appears to worry about that. The way that people collude in the process of their dumbing down appals me.
The 1% of super-rich plutocrats who pull the strings care about one thing—how much profit they can make to add to their billions. If a machine adds to their wealth, do you really think they'll worry about impoverished, homeless, unemployed workers?
As I commented in the State of Fantasy Fiction thread, increasingly people are without skills to make, maintain and repair things. A lot of devices have their components concealed beneath covers attached by tamper-proof fasteners, to discourage anyone showing initiative. The usual reason given for this, is to protect the environment, for untrained nincompoops shouldn't be allowed to get their mitts on settings that can only be adjusted by trained technicians. In reality, it increases profits through servicing charges and encourages planned obsolescence.
It's not that difficult to imagine a time when having a manual or mental skill is outlawed. We'll all be unthinking components in a machine, spoon-fed processed pap of synthesised knowledge and not allowed to contribute our own stories.
What do you think? Get in now, while you're still allowed to....
Shelley the AI horror writer that pens hair-raising tales | Daily Mail Online
It's disturbing, only if you think about the implications—which most people won't, as it's just another app for them to play with on their iPhone. I'm bothered by it because so many jobs are being taken over by computers and robots. It's easy to look at these changes as being proof that 19th and 20th-century fantasy and science-fiction writing was somehow true—and isn't that fun because it's all been done without the nasty and violent drawbacks?
Granted, there are some perilous jobs that drones and robots do more efficiently and with no risk to human life—tasks such as delivering medicine to remote communities stricken with natural disaster, searching for survivors of earthquakes, examining and carrying out controlled explosions on bombs and even mechanised killing machines, along the lines of those predicted in the Terminator films.
Robots have long been used in factories, to make such things as automobiles that require accurate and repetitive assembly. I wonder how many workers have been laid off as a result of this...Back in the 19th-century, with the Industrial Revolution and an increase in mechanisation, traditional hand workers protested the changes that were throwing them aside. The Luddites were English textile workers who destroyed weaving machines. The term has entered the language to describe those opposed to technology replacing human beings. Sabotage has dodgier origins as a term used for deliberate destruction of property, though the image of disgruntled workers throwing their wooden clogs, called sabots, into machines is pleasing.
These days, I guess the best way to screw up the system would be to engineer a power-cut, infect a network with a virus or simply pour water onto the motherboards!
It's comforting to think, that we as creative writers are unique and inimitable, but a truism in life is that no one is irreplaceable. Already, people accept that whatever Google tells them is irrefutably correct—few people think for themselves anymore—they merely want a quick answer.
The idea that readers will turn to stories created for them by a machine—and with their input—isn't far-fetched these days. Just look at how common the use of Computer Generated Imagery is in movies and the way that pop singers have their inadequate voices corrected by Auto-Tune.
It's predicted that holograms will appear instead of musicians at concerts. Missed your favourite singer before he died? No problem, watch their hologram perform.
Rock star Ronnie James Dio set for world tour – despite having died in 2010
No one knows what's real these days, and no one appears to worry about that. The way that people collude in the process of their dumbing down appals me.
The 1% of super-rich plutocrats who pull the strings care about one thing—how much profit they can make to add to their billions. If a machine adds to their wealth, do you really think they'll worry about impoverished, homeless, unemployed workers?
As I commented in the State of Fantasy Fiction thread, increasingly people are without skills to make, maintain and repair things. A lot of devices have their components concealed beneath covers attached by tamper-proof fasteners, to discourage anyone showing initiative. The usual reason given for this, is to protect the environment, for untrained nincompoops shouldn't be allowed to get their mitts on settings that can only be adjusted by trained technicians. In reality, it increases profits through servicing charges and encourages planned obsolescence.
It's not that difficult to imagine a time when having a manual or mental skill is outlawed. We'll all be unthinking components in a machine, spoon-fed processed pap of synthesised knowledge and not allowed to contribute our own stories.
What do you think? Get in now, while you're still allowed to....
