parts

by bofa xesjum

bud jones was a regular guy, but the people who ruled the world were idiots. bud went to work every day. he followed the prescribed formula. he worked in an office with a woman named sally. sally was a little bit overweight. bud, on the other hand, was a bit undernourished. francine, who also worked in the office, thought bud should marry sally because she would feed him right and put a little meat on his bones. in thinking such thoughts as these, francine was a rather old-fashioned person and not in touch with modern thinking. olive was the office manager. she did not pay much attention to her underlings’ secret thoughts and desires as long as they did their work. harry gardner owned the business. in some ways harry liked owning his own business and being master of his little kingdom.. but he realized that the handwriting was on the wall and that the wolf was at the door and the fox was prowling around the chicken coop. times had changed, as some philosophers maintain they always do. the losses were piling up exponentially. harry needed to sell the business while he could get something for it. but what he could get was getting smaller with each passing day. harry began spending less and less time in the office. and more and more time at pedro’s bar and grill, sitting in a booth with his phone and making call after call trying ti find a buyer for his doomed business. he did not want to do this at the office for fear that the employees would overhear him. he explained this to gloria, another habitue of pedro’s bar and grill. gloria did not see the problem. what do you care what they think, she enquired of harry in her deep drinkers voice, what are they going to do, shoot you? they might quit, harry repiled. even if they did not quit, as little work as they do now, they would do even less, and we would sell even less and the business would be worth even less. gloria did not argue, although she was not convinced. actually, she did not really care one way or the other. what is it you sell again?, she asked harry, just to be saying something. she could never remember. parts, harry replied. i sell parts. parts of what? gloria persisted. but harry pretended he did not hear her.

the car

by bofa xesjum

it was raining on jocko’s grave. x-8765397 was standing over it. he had taken exit 11 to get to get to the graveyard. a voice emerged from the clouds. soon it will be night, the voice said. get back on the highway. i would hate to see everything we have done so far come to naught. you left something in the car , the voice continued, any bum or police officer could come along and find it. i have had my day, x-8765397 replied. now i am a prisoner of the night. i want to start a new life. soon it will be night, the voice repeated authoritatively. the car was a blue 2012 ford focus x-8765397 hated the car. he wanted to leave it on the highway and start hitchhiking. he had loved mountain climbing back in the day. x-8765397 turned and walked away, back toward the car. through the rain. what a life, he thought despondently. the voice went back into the cloud. the cloud followed zero man back to the road. the rain was still there. but the car was gone. find it, the voice commanded. i have already found it. a million times. and it always gets stolen. find it again.

programs

by a thoughtful citizen

deep blue defeated gary kasparov in may 1997, now almost thirty years ago. deep blue was a program designed specifically to play chess and not considered “artificial intelligence”. since then it has become taken for granted that humans have no chance against programs, “a i” or otherwise, in playing chess. i remember reading a statement by kasparov himself that “for a few dollars anyone can now purchase a program that can crush a grandmaster”. kasparov’s thoughts on the subject are readily available online. more recently, i read something to the effect that the biggest problem facing anyone trying to design computer chess games today was producing something that a human could beat. here in the year 2024, it seems that a i , in producing “creative work” of any kind, and superseding human producers, might be at the same tipping point as deep blue was against kasparov in 1997. the time may not be long before a i programs can leave human “creators” as far back in the dust as chess programs have left human chess players. in the last year or so, kindle direct publishing, amazon’s service for self-publishing, has added a question as to whether a i programing has been used by the author to produce the work being submitted. i do not know if a “yes” answer prevents kdp from accepting the work. probably not - at this point, they may just want the information for statistics, thrillers, romance novels, fantasy novels, and screenplays (excepting the most arty) would seem the first in the line of fire. it may not be long before - the time may already be here - when an a i program can not only produce smoother, more palatable products of this sort but produce them instantaneously. recently hollywood screenwriters went on strike, and eventually settled with the studios, the studios apparently agreeing - for now - that they “needed” the writers. but for how long? it seemed to me that the writers were rushing into the fiery furnace and provoking the studios into speeding up the process of replacing them with a i. what about “serious” writing? what about programs duplicating famous authors of the past - shakespeare, jane austen, dickens, whoever? in these cases i think it would depend on the audience’s acceptance. some shakespeare or jane austen buffs might welcome convincing pastiches of these old favorites. books of this sort are already produced, with no subterfuge, of authors both in the public domain and authorized by the authors’s estates. conan doyle is the most obvious example. but as you get closer to the present it seems less likely that any audience would accept this sort of thing. the readers of “serious” writing want to identify with the author and apparently want to feel they “know“, or at least know something about, them. one evidence of this is the ubiquity of author interviews. another is the concern so many readers now have with “problematic” authors - authors whose opinions on political or social matters, or actions in their real lives, the readers view with horror or disapproval or contempt. would these readers have any interest in “serious” writing by a i? my guess is that they would not. theoretically, publishers could invent “authors” for these works, but would it be worth their while, given the relatively low sales of such works, and the risk of backlash if they were caught out? so - a likely foreseeable future is one in which most writing is produced by a i programs, but a small amount of non-genre writing - the kind of writing that wins prizes like booker prizes and national book awards - will be produced by humans - most or all of it by graduates of creative writing programs.