#33. Among these dark Satanic Mills?

It has been a while since I have put out a newsletter. To sum up: I have been moderately busy and also moderately lazy. Anyway, the plan is to do this a whole lot more, maybe even more than once a week. (???) (You: I’ll believe it when I see it. Me: Samesies.)

Anyway, things have been Happening with a capital H. From January to February, we were all very very sick. In March, we moved from North Salt Lake to Millcreek, a move which was in equal parts terrible and wonderful. In April we took a deep breath, got sick a little bit more, and tried unsuccessfully to unpack. In May, Erin and I went on a cruise to Alaska (and it was AH-MAZING.) And now it’s June.

During that time, I have been working on two books: Variant 3 (titled The Falcons), and my schizophrenia book, Our Finite Disappointments. They’re in various stages of submission and revision and shopping.

ANYWAY, now that we all know what I’ve been up to, here’s what I actually want to talk about: the Dark Satanic Mills.

I have been thinking a lot about AI, partly because everyone is talking about AI, but especially because my day job (marketing agency writer) uses AI sometimes so I’m required to use it, and also because my part time job (writin’ books) exists in a world where merely touching ChatGPT with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole is a sin.

To be clear: I find AI art, AI writing, and AI-farmed creativity loathsome. I absolutely hate that I can ask ChatGPT to write a chapter in the style of Robison Wells, and it spits out a chapter that could have been a very crappy rough draft of one of my old novels--including the actual character names. That’s stupid and plagiarism and theft and I hate it. At work (where--again--I am REQUIRED to use AI) I have switched almost entirely from ChatGPT and Gemini to Claude, because it is owned by Anthropic, and Anthropic was successfully sued for a billion-and-a-half dollars by authors--so I can kinda say “well, this AI company has paid SOMETHING for stealing my books.”

Anyway, I don’t want to talk a lot about theft, because there’s something bigger that I want to talk about. In a recent graduation commencement speech, the speaker was booed for saying that we are entering a new Industrial Revolution. And to that, I say: Boo! And to that I also say: Yes, we absolutely are, no matter how much it sucks. As a writer, whose company is edging closer and closer to the AI takeover, I am constantly scared of being made obsolete. I know that RIGHT NOW, AI can’t do what I can do. But I don’t know that TWO YEARS FROM NOW it won’t be able to. I have no idea--none at all--what the future of internet marketing will be. Will it still need writers at all? Will it need managers who shepherd little AI sheep to do the work while we sit back and watch? Or will we find out that it just doesn’t work very well (like companies like Microsoft discovered) and realize that maybe humans are better than robots? I DON’T KNOW, and it’s very hard to plan for the future.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that they want to build a 40,000 acre data center here in Utah--a data center that will require twice as much power as the entire state is currently using. (For those who can’t picture what 40,000 acres looks like, that’s 63 square miles. Of servers and mainframes and wires and stuff.) Also, you need water to run a 63 square mile data center! SO MUCH WATER. Also, when you have a power plant that generates twice as much electricity as the entire state of Utah, that gets really hot, and, well, this is a real nice climate you’ve got here... be a shame if something happened to it.

ANYWAY, let’s talk about the Industrial Revolution through the eyes of the people who lived it. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem titled The Secret of the Machines, which I won’t quote in its entirety (but I encourage you to read it). But it’s from the point of view of The Machines: it starts by talking about all the big neat things that Industry is doing for us--about how quick Machines can dig a mine, and how precisely Machines can build our tools, and how efficiently Machines can cut our wheat, and how Machines can put the massive Mauretania out to sea (he calls it a “monstrous nine-decked city”). And then The Machines speak the following words:

Do you wish to make the mountains bare their head

And lay their new-cut forests at your feet?

Do you want to turn a river in its bed,

Or plant a barren wilderness with wheat?

Shall we pipe aloft and bring you water down

From the never-failing cisterns of the snows,

To work the mills and tramways in your town,

And irrigate your orchards as it flows?

It is easy! Give us dynamite and drills!

Watch the iron-shouldered rocks lie down and quake

As the thirsty desert-level floods and fills,

And the valley we have dammed becomes a lake.

But remember, please, the Law by which we live,

We are not built to comprehend a lie,

We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.

If you make a slip in handling us you die!

We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—

Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!-

Our touch can alter all created things,

We are everything on earth—except The Gods!

Speaking of AI, I don’t know if I’ve heard a better description than “We can neither love nor pity nor forgive / If you make a slip in handling us you die!” We simply don’t know what we’re dealing with, and yet AI is asking us “It is easy! Give us dynamite and drills!”

But that’s not the end of the poem!

Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,

It will vanish and the stars will shine again,

Because, for all our power and weight and size,

We are nothing more than children of your brain!

Kipling’s postscript there gives some hope--that even though the smoke of Industry and Machines will block out the heavens, the heavens are still there, and one day the smoke will vanish and the stars will shine again. It’s certainly an optimistic appraisal, and one I’d like to have when I’m staring down the barrel of a data center. Because AI is literally the children of our brains! People get mad at things like the em-dash--like this one here--and this one--because AI uses them so much. People assume that if something has an em-dash, then it must be written by AI--but AI learned everything it knows about writing from reading human-written content! AI is the child of our brains?

It’s hard to have a conclusion here, because: I dunno what’s gonna happen. Life’s crazy and if I live to be 100 I’ll never figure it out. Let’s just hope that when I get to be 100, AI is working for me, and not me for it.

Bits and Bobs from the News

1. As we transition from the nightmare of AI to something that is even more terrifying: a biotech startup is trying to grow cloned human brains--minus the consciousness. In other words: unconscious meat sacks that we can use to grow transplantable organs--to kill and dissect as much as we please, because without consciousness, what’s the harm? Right? RIGHT? Well, bioethicists are telling them to hold their horses, primarily because, duh, NO ONE UNDERSTANDS WHERE CONCIOUSNESS COMES FROM. But to get even more dystopian and horrifying, some posit that consciousness is much more common than we previously thought--lots and lots of animals, it turns out--might be conscious. WHO KNOWS??? Read the article. It’s wild.

2. New octopus just dropped. This is the Good News portion of the newsletter. 1700 meters below the surface, next to the Galapagos Islands (where all the best nature belongs) marine biologists found this cute lil guy.

3. Back to data centers: what if, instead of a big one (well, probably in addition to the big one) we had millions of little ones, attached to the side of your house.A new tech startup (those guys again) want to strap a box about the size of an air conditioner to your wall, and it would take some of your electricity, and some of your water, and you would get in return discounted utility bills and free internet. Seems like a good idea? Bad idea? I have no idea. It doesn’t even sound like that interesting of an idea, except that it just spreads the mess out over an even bigger area.

4. You know how AI is always getting things wrong? One researcher wanted to find out how bad it could screw up your health. So he created a fake university, a fake researcher, a fake journal, and made up an eyelid disorder called bixonimania. And, he did very little to spread the word about this, but AI really likes quoting journals and universities, and pretty soon... if you asked ChatGPT about a pink rash on your eyelid, you would be diagnosed with bixonimania. Anyway, AI is super dumb.

Distractions and Diversions

As mentioned, I went on a cruise. And while I was on this cruise, I ate SO MUCH. And some of it was, like, “cruise good” but not “fine restaurant good”. And then I had Beef Wellington. Now, I have never had Beef Wellington before, so I have no idea where this ranks on a scale of Poorington to Bestington, but it was the best thing I ate on that ship. In this video, the chefs at Fallow make every variation of Beef Wellington you could think of. (In a good way. These are Michelin-acquainted chefs.)

Everyone’s favorite internet person, Hank Green, put out this delightful video about the Mola Mola, a fish that has been mocked to meme status because it appears to be, well, just a really dumb fish. But this video explains why the Mola Mola is stupid--like a fox!

Have you watched the series Last Meals? Think Hot Ones, but instead of interviewing celebrities while they’re eating increasingly spicy food, they interview celebrities’ ideal last meals--and while they eat they talk through the story of their life. There’s been years of episodes, but the one I’m highlighting is Andrew Zimmern, who you may know from Bizarre Foods. He’s a guy who has tried absolutely everything, a worked alongside Anthony Bourdain.

And that’s it! Thanks for reading! Don’t let AI git ya! The one poem that I neglected to share when I was talking about the Industrial Revolution is this, from Scottish poet Robert Burns, when he saw the plumes of black smoke from factory chimneys:

We cam na here to view your warks

In hopes to be mair wise,

But only, lest we gang to Hell,

It may be nae surprise.