Artificial Envy

I promised that last week's entry would be the last on this weird, never-to-see-the-light-of-day, novel I've been working on for NaNoWriMo.  Well, I lied.  There is one more (at least) topic about which I wish to share my rambling thoughts.

At least this one will not be about Universal Basic Income.  Instead, this week's topic is about gender identity and how it may change with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.  This is connected to my bogart-in-a-box because I decided that one of the characters, the teenage son of the protagonist, chooses not to identify as any gender.

Of course, all character traits have to have a motive and this one is no exception.  So, how does Artificial Intelligence connect to sloughing off gender as a personal identifier?  Read on.

Universal Basic Dystopia

This is the fourth and (probably) final installment on my current writing experiment: what might the world look like if Universal Basic Income were implemented?  The first three looked at the basic concept, the suite of tools that I think might be used and how people might take advantage of it.  This one will look at how the government might take advantage of it.

Please keep in mind that this is all conjecture.  I do not know that any of this would actually fall this way.  I remain a proponent of Universal Basic Income, crypto-currencies and their associated Smart Contracts.  I believe that technology will and should be installed inside the human body.  But the thing that I'm writing has taken on a life of its own and is not going in the direction that I originally intended.  And that's a good thing as it makes thing more interesting.

Universal Basic Crime

This continues my series on whatever it is that I'm writing for NaNoWriMo.  The first two can be found here and here.

As of the afternoon of Sunday, November 19, 2017, I'm sitting at 32,184 words written of the 50K required to 'win' National Writing Month.  I'm averaging around 1,700 words a day, which gets me across the finish line on 11/29.  Only not really.  I'll have 50K words written, but this story will be far from finished.  The challenge for me will be two fold: finishing the rest of the rough draft and then doing re-writes.

I already know that I need to fix things.  My villain is turning out to be someone quite different than the one I set out to use.  This is a real issue as I wrote the climactic fight scene first.  In the past, I've tried to be a bit more linear, starting at the beginning and slogging through to the end.  Unfortunately, I realized at about 30K words that I had no idea where the story was going.  I had all kinds of characters and a large problem for them to work on, but I did not know how the problem had originated or how it could be fixed.  So this time, I thought that I'd solve the problem first, then figure out how the characters got there.  I'm not sure that it's better, but I can say that the Scrivener writing software absolutely ROCKS for non-linear story telling.  I highly recommend it.

So what is the central conflict?  Read on.

Universal Basic Mechanics

As stated last week, I'm charging head long down the National Novel Writing Month annual challenge.  I'm up to 21,400 words as of the break I'm taking to write this blog.  The premise of my unlikely-to-see-the-light-of-day novel is to look at crime in a world where Universal Basic Income has been implemented.  What does that world look like and how will people try to take advantage of it.

Last week's post looked at how employment might actually change.  The TL;DR is that while people should be able to survive without work, it will be basic survival.  There will still be an incentive for people to work and companies to employ them.

This week I want to mentally explore how UBI might actually work from a back office stand point.  How does the government ensure that the right people get the right amount?  What existing and/or emerging technologies might be use to make it happen?  Read on...

Universal Basic Plot Device

This last week marks the start of November.  For most of us in the United States, this heralds nothing more than Trick-or-Treating, the end of Daylight Savings Time and the impending doom that is Thanksgiving with its aggressive day-after shopping blitzkrieg.

However, for a few thousand of us, in the US and beyond, it also starts the annual confrontation with self-motivation, internal demons and writer's block known as National Novel Writing Month.  NaNoWriMo for short.  The goal is to write 50,000 words in one month.  1,667 words a day.

I have entered a few times and completed it once (Purity, an attempted mash up of "The Last Unicorn" with "Game of Thrones").  Then I realized that 50,000 words, as many as that is, does not automatically equal a completed work of art.  I did not have an ending, merely a collection of scenes, some of which might be worth keeping, all of which would need to be extensively rewritten if they were ever going to be worth anything.  It now sits on my Google Drive and mocks me when I open that folder.  So I don't open that folder.

This year, I've done more pre-planning and am starting by writing the climax and then working backwards.  I'm not sure if this is any better than working in a more linear fashion, but it can't be worse.  You can track my progress, if you care, here.

Aside from the I'm-writing-this-and-this-other-thing-so-you-should-be-interested-in-both, there is more connecting this blog to my nascent novel.  Because of all my rambling thoughts on Universal Basic Income, Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and Smart IDs, I've decided to set the novel in a world where all of those things are ubiquitous parts of the landscape.  I plan on using this post, and all of the rest through the month of November, to build this world in a fast-finger stream of consciousness.

Blog-O-Matic Automation

There were not many news items this last week that affected the Internet of Things.  A few, to be sure:

• New laws on how ISPs can sell browsing data
• A sale at Lowes on GE Z-Wave switches (most likely gone thanks to people like yours truly).

Of course, there was also the usual horde of investor articles that seem to rehash the same points: security, cost savings (or not) and how it will affect jobs.  I generally ignore most of those because they rarely say anything new and that bores me (and I write articles that are at least three times longer than the usual Buzzfeed crap, so I rank my attention span as better than the average internet goldfish).

But, as usual, something did catch my eye: another question on Reddit, in the /r/singularity section.  "Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Content Writers in the Future?"  Most of the comments are pro human: "Content for mindless dribble, 100% yes."  And that's a sentiment with which I mostly agree.  For ad copy and other boiler plate kinds of content (financial reports, etc), it may already have taken over.  Which is great, because most of us humans don't like writing that stuff (though we'll cash the check for the work).

What about 'real' content: long form, creative writing?  For the purposes of this article, we'll take 'creative' to mean fiction, opinion and in-depth reporting all of which require a creative use of language to keep the reader's attention.  What some of the articles on AI writing start calling 'soul' or 'heart'.  As someone who holds a BA in English, I want to dive into what that 'soul' is.

The current state of AI writing bots appear to be good at highly formulaic prose, hence the financial reports and legal briefs and other content that for whatever reason needs to stay within strict bounds.  Anywhere that a dropped comma can cost a company millions needs something with a superhuman attention to detail and legal exposure.  The current AI systems should be perfect for this.

However, to keep a reader's attention (and if you've made it this far, then I'm not too bad at it) requires not only following grammar rules, but also knowing when to break them.  I have a Greek chorus of writing instructors that scream in my ear every time that I start a sentence with 'And'.  And yet I do it often because it sounds 'right' to my inner ear.

In fact, most of us appreciate rule breaking in writing because it makes the writing more interesting.  It has to be done carefully and with intent, but that is what second and third (and fourth) drafts are for.  This is why it will be difficult for AI to 'own' content creation.  All artistic disciplines have these rules and all of them reward those artists that break them with intent.

Ultimately, this is because successful formulas become boring with repetition.  In our present pop culture zeitgeist, this is most obvious in summer tent pole blockbuster movies.  The current reigning champ is Disney/Marvel with their MCU which is going on nine years of movies since Iron Man was released in 2008.  Disney has also had success with family animation movies and princess movies and theme park rides.  Much is because they do have a formula, The Hero's Journey.  Yet, they do no slavishly follow all of its beats.  They mix it up, eventually pitting hero against hero in order to make the formula feel fresh (keep in mind that Civil War is really a Captain America movie, so all of the other Avengers in the film are there to distract us from the formula of Cap's journey).

Will AI be able to break the rules with intent?  No doubt some clever boffin will figure out the algorithm to make that happen.  Then Michael Bay will only need to enter a brief and a few actors' names, press a button and have another Transformers movie.  One that will make enough money to allow him to press the button again and again until the formula becomes old.  And there's the point.  New formulas require people to feed them into the AI.  New rules to implement and then break.

At least, they will as long as the AIs are writing for humans.  As soon as they start creating for themselves and their interests, then all of the rules are out the window.