The Only Question You Need to Ask ChatGPT.

Category: AI/robotics, ink on art

No, it’s nothing to do with “Alberta brewery’s first AI-designed beer“. Although I’m not ruling out the possibility that maybe it should be. Regular visitors already know my overall perspective on this whole Chatbot/AGI thing. Recent events, while entertaining, haven’t changed my opinion all that much. (Although it’s nice to see an uptick of people […]

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The Apex of Tinseltown.

Category: art on ink, ink on art, interviews, On the Road, public interface

Turns out I have an IMDB page. I didn’t realize that myself until recently. It is very short— as befitting someone with no real presence in the industry—and yet also padded. A guest appearance on a Guelph-based podcast doesn’t really strike me as a cinematic credit, for one thing. And while I did get a […]

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Stanley Kubrick, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Neill DeGrasse Tyson walk into the Mines of Moria…

Category: ink on art, On the Road, spaaaaace!!!, Uncategorized

…and turn this… …into this… and and and and and …and I gotta say, I was skeptical that they could surpass the steampunk menagerie of Nantes’ Les Machines de l’île—but the Frawnsh seem to be absolute fucking masters at this sort of thing. The still photos don’t really do justice even to the scale of […]

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Tub Thump Dump.

Category: On the Road, public interface

It’s not that there aren’t a bunch of things to talk about. I want to review a certain anime series that combines unremarkable animation with some of the sharpest TV writing I’ve ever encountered on the subject of personality uploads. I want to share my perspective on the tech bros and futurists and “prototypers” who […]

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The Pong Imperative: Driving Dishbrain to Suicide.

Category: neuro, sentience/cognition

Achilles Desjardins had always found smart gels a bit creepy. People thought of them as brains in boxes, but they weren’t. They didn’t have the parts. Forget about the neocortex or the cerebellum—these things had nothing. No hypothalamus, no pineal gland, no sheathing of mammal over reptile over fish. No instincts. No desires. Just a […]

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Remora

Category: fiblet

Just below the surface, now. The stars so close he can almost see them. The prep compartment is equal parts hope and terror: just a few more meters to the shuttle, Heinwald can see the docking hatch right there in front of him. But isn’t this always where the monster jumps out? Isn’t it during […]

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The Jovian Duck: LaMDA and the Mirror Test

Category: AI/robotics, sentience/cognition

 You all must know about this Google LaMDA thing by now. At least, if you don’t, you must have been living at the bottom of Great Bear Lake without an Internet connection. Certainly enough of you have poked me about it over the past week or so. Maybe you think that’s where I’ve been. For […]

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The Aspirational Zombie.

Category: ink on art, neuro, sentience/cognition

Long-time readers of the ‘crawl might remember that I’ve never had much patience for the AI’s Just Wanna Live trope. I put my bootprint on it in my very first novel— “Expert defense witnesses, including a smart gel online from Rutgers, testified that neuron cultures lack the primitive midbrain structures necessary to experience pain, fear, […]

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Parts of People.

Category: ink on art, neuro

“My life has been 107 hours long,” says Ms. Casey, Wellness Counselor at Lumon Industries, moments after learning she won’t be making it to 108. “Of all that time, my favorite was the eight hours I spent in Macrodata Refinement. You could say those were my Good Old Days.” Of course, Ms. Casey—or whatever her […]

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Inadvertent Virtue

Category: politics

I’d been negotiating intermittently with my Russian publisher for months: backlist titles up for renewal, a new collection of short stories. We’d been poking back and forth since November. Everything was in coming together. Then Putin went ballistic. The wall came down. The paperwork was done but no money had changed hands—so, the contracts remain […]

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