Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I hear comparisons of the present moment to other moments that
history we hear we may be doomed to repeat. History is a cyclical
trajectory, we keep coming back to similar frameworks and
appearances. Though in fact history, like memory, is flawed, full of
inaccuracies and inconsistencies, dependent on the biases of
historians along the way. Conflicting accounts are easy to find.
Journalists' accounts as events happen can also be contradictory.
Good luck finding any kind of absolute truth.

So I don't take much guidance or solace from history. Or from
reporting by professional or citizen journalists. But we have to
believe something... what can we believe? Maybe focus on the
present, take everything else with a huge grain of salt.
  

    
This is a weirdly exceptional time, nothing before was quite like
it. Despite the craziness of the moment, we're living better than
ever before. We have efficient systems delivering electrical power
and potable water. We have well-constructed sewer and waste removal
dealing with our waste. We spend much time simply being entertained,
and this includes that "infotainment" sources that we call "news."
We have so much food... obesity kills more people than malnutrition
in first world countries. Many think nothing of traveling thousands
of miles every year. Our jobs are relatively light work.
  

    
All of this is more fragile than we think. We pump so many emissions
into the atmosphere that the planet may soon be uninhabitable. Our
power systems are strained by increasing demands now further
strained by AI-centric data centers. Many communities (like Austin,
where I live) are overbuilt and running out of water.

Yet I look ouside my window as I type. The sky is blue, the trees
are green, the sun is shining.  As Bruce has said to me many times,
"Every day is a gift."
  

    
I have a theory that history is a slinky.  Viewed end on it appears
to repeat.  If you move to the side however, you can see that it's
going somewhere.  Not entirely random - it's following the terrain
of possibilities.

Best of times, worst of times.  I believe that was supposed to be
just before the French Revolution.  But still, that was Dickens'
view.  Wonder what others would have said?

When I walk outside each morning I'm almost shocked by the immanent
realness, and beauty, of it all.  Partly that's California when I'm
not originally from here, but partly it's surviving cancer at 21 and
the gratitude I still feel for being in the world.  Things could
have gone very differently.  Things could have stopped, for me at
21, altogether.  And it gives me, at least, a different relationship
to disaster or fears or rumors of such.
  

    
A colorful article here about Centralia, Pennsylvania, here, the
world-famous 1960s eco-disaster that's been gushing climate-change
fumes for 60 years.  You'd think it would be a permanent sci-fi
dystopia, but there's no there there.  Mostly it's weeds becoming
forests.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/centralia-pennsylvania-rebirth

It's easy to wig out when the screens are full of noise, but the
future demographics are about population decline.  I had it figured
that there would be a world of fewer people, then fewer and fewer,
decelerating faster and faster.  A Population Bomb that's gone into
reverse is hard for contemporary people to understand, but I thought
I had some touchpoints for it.
  

    
What I didn't anticipate at all was a future world with tsunamis of
people-like statistical-parrot entities.  Digital structures that
could hear, and  talk, and see, and  translate, and make jokes, and
psychoanalyze, and maybe even physically walk around and grip stuff.


They're not a "demographic," and not remotely human, but they seem
to be a freshly-invented artificial people-putty, a kind of
collective-intelligence papier-mache to slop into the cracks when
your society is splitting up, and there's nobody born next door. 
That's a very strange trend indeed.  It's such a strange trend that
it feels less like a genuine "trend" and more like a collective
hallucination.

Maybe we'll wake up from it some year, and realize we imagined we
were in a metaverse, but we've really been in Centralia all along.
  

    
Enjoying the Battelle "prediction list for 2026."  I've never once
"believed" anybody's list like this, but I've been reading them with
focussed interest for decades on end, and I'm still not jaded.

https://medium.com/@johnbattelle/predictions-2026-the-full-list-bbe4c35576fb 
  

    
Here's a quote from that list that resonates...

"The evolution of society with AI will be messy, ungoverned, and
seemingly incomprehensible. But at its core lies an existential
question: What happens to us when we build machines capable of
fabricating reality, seemingly rendering us obsolete in the
process?"
  

    
Via email from Jack Kausch:

I suppose my question is, if America collapses into civil disorder
and fascism, dragging the world economy with it, will there still be
global democratic institutions, or any global institutions,
following the decline? International law and the existence of the
U.N. is such a historically specific circumstance which emerged from
the unprecedented period of the first two Great Wars. I am skeptical
of "world federalism with Chinese Characteristics" happening anytime
soon, partly because Chinese culture does not have the long buildup
that British imperialism did to normalize English before the
American century -- but maybe this is naive. Something tells me the
whole world will be facing mighty headwinds. Is there any hope for
international law and global governance institutions at the other
end of this?
  

    
can someone recap? dont have a medium account and am not about to
start one. this in ref to battelle's predictions

i keep idly wonder what will happen when the datacenters started
running out of power and water... or maybe the 'earth abides'
scenario, of ppl to tend to the failing racks...
  

    
I'm not sure how to recap a list, but it's about the future of AI,
and our future with AI. And some other tech forecasts... e.g. the
decline of the feed in social media, tech will get even bigger this
year - from what he says, I think the implication is that there'll
be less caution about mergers and acquisitions becuase the current
administration isn't opposed to monopolistic behaviors.
  

    
Here's an article about water consumption of data centers:
<https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption>

Check the end of the article, "Making Data Centers More
Water-Efficient."  Where both power and water are concerned, if
we're going to support this larger number of data centers with more
demands from AI processes, it's critical to make them more efficient
users of both water and power. I think there's a lot of activity in
both areas. That's one piece of the puzzle. It could also be that
the demand for AI is less than projected, data centers will be
overbuilt, some of them will eventually be converted to shopping
malls or amusement parks.
  

    <scribbled by corlin Thu 15 Jan 26 12:45>
  

    
i always find the futures work done by fictive folks like <bruces>
and (RIP) john brunner so much truer than those trends of the
upcoming year newsletters. truer in the deeper sense...
  

    
I believe it becomes considerably harder to do predictions in times
of turbulence which is what we're in now.

The metastable equilibrium is heaving and tearing as it looks for
its new position and shape.  Its new equilibrium, which can take an
unspecified period of time.  Moreover in the climate, so long as the
forcing function considers to pour vast quantities of carbon into
the atmosphere it's not possible to settle into a new equilibrium. 
The natural environment always found a new equilibrium.  Whether
your species liked the new equilibrium or not was another matter -
it was your task to adapt or die.
  

    
Sorry I am new here.

I wanted to say something about the state of the world.
So I wrote it up as a blog post.


Tensegrity as a social structure.

https://world.hey.com/corlin/tensegrity-as-a-social-structure-eae31b38
  

    
Those ghosts are hungry for energy and also for tasks. You give them
a task and they go off and do it, and come back for more. If you're
eager to move a project forward, it's tempting to try to keep the
machine busy by feeding them more work, so you end up working at
their pace, not yours.

If they responded instantly, keeping them busy would obviously be
impossible so I wouldn't think about it that way.
  

    
Friends of mine in the design world are lamenting  that design
schools are collapsing.  The schools cost too much to attend, and
the loss of foreign students may have been a fatal blow to many,
including some very old and storied schools that were cradles of
American creativity.

"Design" is of interest to me because it's a sister of "science
fiction," born near the same year.  Also "industrial design" existed
under past historical conditions of "industrialization," and that's
not what's going on nowadays.  

The world's number-one "industrial design school" was the Bauhaus. 
The Bauhaus was (A) shuttered by the Nazis and then (B) absolutely
bombed flat by the Allies.   I suspect that the Bauhaus became much
more influential worldwide *after the Bauhaus was destroyed.*. When
it was gone, there were no nutty professors left to pick a fight
with, so they became legends, gurus.
  

    
American industrial design was particularly noted worldwide for
"planned obsolescence," "consumer friendliness" and the doctrine of
"Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable."    But if the obsolescence is not
planned (it's collapse, or "disruption"), and there are no
middle-class "consumers" as a class (they're oligarch peons, or
maybe they're Chinese), and also there's no general vector of
general advancement (no one is "progressive,", there's no
"modernity,") then clearly it's hard to formally teach people to do
all or any of those things.  You can teach how they were done.  But
you can't perform them.
  

    

You can say very similar things about the sister-project of
"American science fiction," which hasn't been about American science
for quite a long time now.   The American urge to do science
speculation has gone straight into market speculation.  It's a
native 21st century form of repackaged visionary sci-fi which is
mostly about supporting stock bubbles.  It's megacorporate sci-fi as
grift.  "Sell the sizzle, not the steak;   sell the Mars colony, not
the satellite cloud; sell the Metaverse, not the surveillance.
  

    

I sympathize with my design colleagues; I myself rather like
"teaching" in their design schools, which I put in quotes because I
don't teach much.  Instead I force innocent young people to
contemplate and work on my own problems.  "That was one of the most
interesting courses I ever took here!" was a common response when I
showed up, but that's because I class-lecture at 'em like a
novelist-entertainer instead of some functional guy who actually
needs to ship product.  It was fun while it lasted, okay?  I learned
some good things!
  

    
 don't think design "dies" with the death of American design
schools, mostly because design per se is a lot older than the
techniques taught in design schools anywhere.   Also, coders who
encounter Claude Code, whether they know it or not, are declaring en
masse that they have to stop being software-typists,  and, somehow,
loftily,  become context-organizers, branding visionaries, interface
and UX designers.  

"We can ship AI product in  just ten days, so now we have to
concentrate hard on getting people to voluntarily like slop and use
slop and not panic at the very sight of it!" That's a very central
design-issue there.   Known in the trade as "the varnish on
barbarism."
  

    

It's disruption as lived experience.  Rather suddenly, there are no
mass-market paperback novels in the USA in 02026.  What?  Really? 
How can you possibly be an American science fiction writer without
lots of cheap, throwaway paperback novels?!  Well, probably you
can't.  Also, you likely haven't been for some time; fiction as a
publishing industry is in collapse in many different ways, but
American science REALLY has problems and is under direct cultural
attack.

 Even if you did well at "science fiction", it was never  a
defensible sinecure.  It was a subculture and a genre.  That was the
strength of it, really.  If it was better-organized and more
businesslike, somebody would have just bought it.
  

    

It's common for science fiction writers, especially elderly ones, to
declare that "science fiction" is dead and will never come back in
some revived form they don't get yet.   But those Language Model
platforms, it's amazing how utterly saturated they are in science
fiction.  They've got internal weights for every jot and tittle of
sci-fi.  If you ask them to cough up a Bruce Sterling parody, they
can slop-out quite a good one.  And boy howdy, they can they ever
"design."  

Of course it's slop, but the design tradition isn't being
annihilated.  Instead, it's being subsumed, folded, spindled and
mutilated into a surprisingly different system.   It seems to be a
system with a lot of unexpected vacancies and absences.  Less like a
crowded bazaar, or even a cyberspace,  and more like a  weedy, tidal
flood-zone.
  

    
I hear the word "slop" a lot, referring to AI output. It's a word
that originally meant "soft mud," and later "food waste" -
specifically food waste fed to hogs... you could "slop the hogs."
Slop has a negative connotation, and where AI is concerned, it's a
manifestation of cultural anxiety about a new technology that few
people really understand. People worry, with reason, about a loss of
human authorship, floods of AI-created content, a devaluation of the
craft of writing and other human endeavors, and replacing human
creativity with machine-generated simulations. 

But there is such a thing as carefully prompted, edited, and curated
AI-assisted work. AI can be used as an effective tool, a support for
human endeavor, a collaborator in the creation of real value. That's
at best.  At worst, it can generate filler, repetitive spam,
unedited marketing copy, and clickbait (images or text). You could
argue that it's not AI that produces slop, rather it's a product of
uncurated scale. Humans did the same sort of thing, AI just made it
faster.

But I don't think we should fear AI so much as we should fear what
powerful people might do with AI. People complain about AI showing
up in various tech contexts, as in search engines (where AI really
can make sense, if it's working well). But the real danger of AI is
in tools they might not readily see or experience. Consider tools
that integrate data and perform AI analysis for tracking and
targeting citizens. In marketing surveillance that has existed for a
while, the goal was to target a potential customer likely to buy
your product. But such a tool, with ever more sophisticated AI,
could be used by an authoritarian government to track and target its
perceived enemies. They might do that anyway, to some extent,
without AI. But AI makes the tracking and targeting faster and more
effective.