I'm working on my next book (maybe two books, there's a lot of material here in two quite different forms) at the moment. One of the key themes in the books surrounds highly integrated neural implants with full access to AI and neural interfaces.
When I wrote about the fire hose of the Internet through the implant, I was thinking about my experiences with VR. VR is immersive, but it actually isn't addictive like phones, because it's so all-encompassing.
It's like the difference between taking a quick drag off a cigarette, or having to sit down for an hour to smoke a full length cigar. The former is quick and intense, the latter takes time, it's an investment. You're not smoking a full length cigar in between downtime at work. For that reason, it's more difficult to get addicted to cigars because it's inherently less habit forming even though the amount of nicotine is far more intense.
Some of the characters actually become addicted to aspects of the interface, but it's not the all-immersive Internet that requires you to make a deep investment to get the full benefit. It's parts that are quick and easy but give a hit of good feelings.
I did the math last night, and at the rate I'm planning to go I'm probably 24 weeks away from publishing day (at least for book 1), but at the rate I'm actually going I'm probably closer to 10-14 weeks away.
I never really cared if The Graysonian Ethic was something special for public consumption since it was never intended primarily for the public -- it was a letter to my son that made sense to publish for practical reasons. Future Sepsis, on the other hand, I do think it's something special. I'm hoping people come away from it changed. I'm certainly coming away from writing it changed.
On that note, it makes me wonder why more writers aren't actually deep wellsprings of wisdom in person. How can you spend all this time creating something so deep and not become deeper in person?
I have this idea, that there's a sort of empathy you can have for non anthropomorphic things -- you can start to think like a machine and earn machine empathy, you can start to think like an ideology or philosophy and earn empathy for those things. To embody something like that properly you have to live in its head. How many writers actually try to do that, and how many just write their own extremely personal story by putting a piece of themselves into the machine instead of making the machine a part of themselves? (But I might just be sniffing my own farts at that point lol)
I'll tell you one thing -- doing things like that doesn't result in a person being able to suddenly map themselves into whatever pablum they want to stick into an Oscar speech to make themselves look good. The world isn't so simple that you just need to follow the "correct" ideology and everything will turn out ok. It's like, "You live in other worlds for a living and all you could come up with is 'we need to follow my favorite ideology'? That's it?"
When I wrote about the fire hose of the Internet through the implant, I was thinking about my experiences with VR. VR is immersive, but it actually isn't addictive like phones, because it's so all-encompassing.
It's like the difference between taking a quick drag off a cigarette, or having to sit down for an hour to smoke a full length cigar. The former is quick and intense, the latter takes time, it's an investment. You're not smoking a full length cigar in between downtime at work. For that reason, it's more difficult to get addicted to cigars because it's inherently less habit forming even though the amount of nicotine is far more intense.
Some of the characters actually become addicted to aspects of the interface, but it's not the all-immersive Internet that requires you to make a deep investment to get the full benefit. It's parts that are quick and easy but give a hit of good feelings.
I did the math last night, and at the rate I'm planning to go I'm probably 24 weeks away from publishing day (at least for book 1), but at the rate I'm actually going I'm probably closer to 10-14 weeks away.
I never really cared if The Graysonian Ethic was something special for public consumption since it was never intended primarily for the public -- it was a letter to my son that made sense to publish for practical reasons. Future Sepsis, on the other hand, I do think it's something special. I'm hoping people come away from it changed. I'm certainly coming away from writing it changed.
On that note, it makes me wonder why more writers aren't actually deep wellsprings of wisdom in person. How can you spend all this time creating something so deep and not become deeper in person?
I have this idea, that there's a sort of empathy you can have for non anthropomorphic things -- you can start to think like a machine and earn machine empathy, you can start to think like an ideology or philosophy and earn empathy for those things. To embody something like that properly you have to live in its head. How many writers actually try to do that, and how many just write their own extremely personal story by putting a piece of themselves into the machine instead of making the machine a part of themselves? (But I might just be sniffing my own farts at that point lol)
I'll tell you one thing -- doing things like that doesn't result in a person being able to suddenly map themselves into whatever pablum they want to stick into an Oscar speech to make themselves look good. The world isn't so simple that you just need to follow the "correct" ideology and everything will turn out ok. It's like, "You live in other worlds for a living and all you could come up with is 'we need to follow my favorite ideology'? That's it?"
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