This tweet inspired me to follow up on the piece about AI art and writing that I published yesterday. I couldn’t agree more. In 2011, a venture capitalist wrote that software was eating the world. More than a decade on, I think it’s fair to say that today, the technology Read more…
Lately, there’s been a lot of discourse about the impact of AI art and writing, and I’ll admit that I feel a bit of trepidation about the abilities of recently-unveiled artificial intelligence projects. There are so many possibilities to fear—its ability to replace creative workers, the hollowness of its art, Read more…
Winter I think I speak for most of the country when I say that 2021 has been a strange year. It began with triumph: covid vaccines on the way, a new party in the White House, an impending major climate change summit where perhaps real progress could be made. It Read more…
The news lately has felt pretty apocalyptic. I won’t get into the international or even national headlines, because there’s far too much there. Instead, I’m going to stick close to my own home, and close to Platformed’s setting. When I wrote Platformed, I imagined a future embattled by climate change, Read more…
Mount Whitney is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States at 14,508 feet — and in the height of summer (or, tbh, a lot of the year during this latest great California drought) it is a walk up climb! But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, exactly. I researched extensively Read more…
In 2018, a conflict erupted at Google when a male software engineer proclaimed that women were less suited to working in technology. Many people came to his defense by citing a study from earlier that year that purported to find that, in countries with higher gender equality, fewer women worked Read more…
Contemplating dystopia in 2020, part 4 — 2021!! Happy New Year! As I look back on this very strange year, I think of some bad puns (hindsight is 2020, anyone?), but mostly I wonder at how we have, and haven’t, coped. Books are the ultimate form of escapism. They temporarily Read more…
Contemplating dystopia in 2020, part 3 In dystopian fiction — indeed, in any fiction — I am interested in the act of surviving itself, not the triumph we hope it’ll lead to. Sometimes characters won’t win, and that doesn’t make their fight unworthy. The same is true of our real Read more…
Contemplating dystopia in 2020, part 2 When the worst happens, humans don’t become monsters. We don’t turn on each other. All of human history has been about community, or at least I prefer to read it that way. I’m not interested in stories that uphold the Great Man Theory of Read more…
Sometimes this year has felt like the opening scenes to a disaster film. I’m far from the first person to make this observation, or to joke about the 2020 showrunners being overzealous in their writing. I mean, those murder hornets in the first act showing up briefly in the headlines Read more…