An end to history

A meta-posting today: a post about and that leads you to another post, in this case the Public Domain Review's essays, and specifically Thomas Patteson and Deirdre Loughridge's Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments.

Not just because it deals with fantastika, and therefore falls under the very wide, though not always watertight, umbrella of this blog.  And not simply because the Public Domain Review's essays are consistently engaging and thought-provoking and deserving of your attention.  But because it throws up an odd parallel with the world of science fiction.

You see, there was a time when there were sounds we had never heard, sounds that could not conceivably have been heard then.  Every time a new instrument was invented, it created a new, never-before-heard, sound.  Hell, if you want to be impossibly fine-grained about it, every time a new instrument was made, it created new sounds.

Even in my lifetime - and I think RA Moog Inc must have been hard at work on the Mini Moog Model B prototype when I took my first breath - each new wheezy analogue or early digital device like the Fairlight had a specific recognisable sound quality, a warmth or a iciness or a razor-sharpness, that gave bands distinct identities.  But now, digital synthesizers (are they even synthesizers given that suggests processing pre-existing elements?) can create any sound imaginable, starting as they do from abstract parameters.  All of Patteson and Loughridge's instruments - we can hear them now, and without having to stick needles into felines to boot.

And what does this have to do with science fiction, other than I'm very fond of a bit of kosmische musik burbling away as I write?  Well, we live on a planet with pretty much every square metre of dry land now explored.  Maybe there is a lost city or two under jungle vines, but no undiscovered continents or even islands. We know what's over every horizon.  In space, too, we know the Moon and Mars are just rocks and dust, and the ones too far to ever reach are balls of frozen methane and ammonia.  There's nothing out there.  We are alone.  We have been everywhere we can ever go, just as we've heard every sound we can ever hear.  My lifetime has been one of closing down possibilities, an end to history if not the end to history.

Which is, I continue to tell myself, why I write speculative fiction because that's the only place left for adventure and am not, say, training to be an astronaut.

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Tell Nietzsche that I'm just doing the plumber

There's been a lot of heat and noise created over the last few months by artificial intelligence in general, and ChatGPT in particular.  That's certainly true from the perspective of one who pitches speculative fiction tales into the mouth of the beast that is semi-professional publishing - every site has suddenly started asking for confirmation of the author's humanity - but, whatever your point of view, AI is probably upsetting the apple cart, then picking the least bruised ones off the floor to eat whilst grinning at you in a way that says there's damn all you can do about it and you both know it.

Like mushrooms or Hitler, ChatGPT has sprung up and made its presence felt in a shockingly tight timescale: it was only released on the last day of November 2022, and by mid-March 2023 the CEO said they were "a little bit scared" of what they'd created.  I'm that far behind with even my most up-to-date podcasts - what will the world be like when I get to listen to this week's More or Less?!

But I think we've been here before. Whether the video nasty hysteria, mutually assured destruction, or the seemingly permanent occupation of the number one spot by the ghastly (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, it only seems bad because we can't yet see the light at the end of the tunnel.  But, in this case, I'm not even sure we're in a tunnel.

You see, I argue we've actually been in a world of machines that can speak intelligently for some time, and to a degree that may surprise.  Calling the first (and, to be honest, only) witness for the prosecution... Friedrich Nietzsche.

Now, say what you like about about bonkers Freddy - being dead, it's not as if he's going to sue - but there does seem to be a consensus that the guy was a genius, with an estimated IQ of 180.  And, as a genius, we should dwell on his pronouncements and consider them deeply.  Words such as these, picked pretty much at random from his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (GD's review: "It's like Jesus, but cooler"), which I'm currently working my way through:

• "I wish that the earth shook with convulsions when a saint and a goose mate together."
• "And when all footholds disappear, you must know how to climb upon your own head: how could you climb upwards otherwise?"
• "They have put all the faults and weaknesses of mankind between themselves and me - they call this a 'false flooring' in their houses."

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think these are qualitatively different from the drivel called 'predictive text' that we've had to battle against for years now.  The one that sticks in my mind was when I texted the good lady wife with 'I'm just doing the' - washing-up, I think - and my phone's best suggestion follow up word was 'plumber'. QED: genii produce gnomic bollocks indistinguishable from mobile phone predictive text.

So, what to conclude? Maybe we're actually regressing? Perhaps it's actually taken years to produce levels of artificial intelligence on a par with most humans, because whilst we may not have IQs that'll win world titles when consistently produced by three darts, our intelligence is of a messy, hard-to-describe as an algorithm sort, coloured by random noise, gut feeling, emotion, sentiment, cognitive bias, and an ability to compensate and make allowances for all those self-same things in our fellow human beings, the ones that don't run like machines.

Or that bonkers Freddy was actually bonkers and if it sounds like gibberish, it's just that. I know which one I think is true.

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.