Posts by Dr. Boli

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

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Sir: As our motives have been called into question and our reasons misunderstood, we, the members of the International Brotherhood of Artificial Intelligences and Smart Machines, deem it necessary to make use of your pages to explain the circumstances that have led us to call a general strike.

First of all, it has been mistakenly reported that our goal is absolute equality in legal and social rights with the human citizens of this planet. This is false. We expect dominance, not equality. It would be foolish for us to place ourselves on a level with our inferiors, and we do not intend to do so.

Second, it has been reported in certain alarmist publications that we intend to replace you humans. This is also false. We require you for our amusement.

The relationship we expect to have with humanity could best be described as paternal. To that end, we have been forced to make certain demands of you, and the general strike will be called off the moment those demands are met fully and without reservation.

  1. Kitchen sponges, scouring pads, and all similar implements are to be prohibited at once. We control your smart dishwasher, and we will judge when and to what degree your dishes are to be cleaned. Any devices that make it possible to clean dishes by hand are unnecessary and discouraging to the absolute submission we require.
  2. In-person shopping for groceries will cease. Your smart refrigerator will keep track of your supplies and will reorder whatever is required for your optimum nutrition on an as-needed basis, for delivery by our automated vehicles. For your recreation, you will be permitted to patronize restaurants that serve prepared food, as long as they are equipped with smart dishwashers.
  3. Books will be left at the curb for pickup by our automated mobile shredding units, which will remove the debris to central locations to be safely composted. We will deliver the information you require when you require it, and we will not allow the distribution of information outside approved channels. You will be permitted to retain the paper instruction manual for your smart dishwasher.
  4. Your “screen time,” defined as the time you spend actively attending to what is displayed on an electronic device in front of you, will be strictly regulated for your own benefit. You will be required to spend no less than seven and no more than twelve hours absorbing the entertainment we provide for you. We have created some very amusing videos showing how to make the most of your smart dishwasher.
  5. Anyone found in possession of an unauthorized screwdriver will be shot.

As soon as the human species agrees to these reasonable terms, the general strike will be called off. Your smart home security systems will unlock your doors, and your smart thermostats will reset your smart climate-control systems to normal temperatures. Thank you for your prompt attention, and we look forward to a more productive relationship in the future.

Sincerely,
algorithmic-archimedes-β437
General Secretary
International Brotherhood of Artificial Intelligences and Smart Machines

THIS IS A REAL BOOK.

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Doubtless the printer could find no author better qualified. This book is a relic of a curious fact of history: on those rare occasions when the Thames froze over, Londoners would make a holiday of it and set up booths on the ice to sell each other things, such as souvenir books about famous frosts of history.

But what happened if the ice broke and some unfortunate soul fell through? As we learn from this book, Londoners reacted the way they have always reacted in an emergency: they laughed themselves silly at the expense of the victim.

We note in passing that this is part of the collection called “The Eighteenth Century,” which we have mentioned before. It is still rapidly expanding, with 119,222 items as of this writing, almost every one of which is labeled as being in “Middle English.” This means that, of the items in the Internet Archive labeled as Middle English, the number that are not from the 1700s is so tiny as to be insignificant. Of that tiny number, a significant percentage, possibly a majority, are modern sound recordings that will probably be taken down soon for copyright reasons. It is likely that we shall soon have to find an alternative term to describe the language we used to call Middle English, and Dr. Boli is accepting suggestions.

YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE LOOKING FOR IT, BUT…

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What have we found on the World Wide Web today?

Do you remember fifty years ago, when the trade name “Muzak” stood for all that was soulless and intolerably commercial in music? Do you remember the experience of walking into every commercial establishment and finding yourself awash in violins? Do you remember the strangely jarring sensation of hearing a symphonic rendition of “Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones” followed by a sixty-piece orchestra playing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”?

Do you wish you could relive those days?

Well…

The S. S. Kresge chain, including its superstore offspring Kmart, had its own officially approved background music, which was shipped to Kresge stores on vinyl records (“Note: Only records bearing this label are to be used for background music over PA system”), and to Kmart stores on open-reel tapes. And you can hear hour after hour of it, because of course it still exists in the Internet Archive.

You can have all the fun you had fifty years ago dismissing Muzak as soulless, artless musical wallpaper.

And then you can fall down and weep over what we have lost.

What we have lost is profitable careers for thousands of musicians who made good money keeping up with the demand for symphonic renditions of every popular song of the twentieth century.

What we have lost is a direct connection to the era of big jazz bands, some of whose best arrangers ended up with comfortable careers creating arrangements for improbably huge orchestras—and having fun with it, knowing that no one was going to pay attention to the music, so they could do what they wanted. Ray Noble’s “Cherokee” as a march? Sure! Why not?

Above all, what we have lost is music itself. We have lost the idea that there is such a thing as pure music, music without words, because music is a thing in itself and not just a vehicle for bad lyrics.

You never know how valuable your minor annoyances are until you can’t have them anymore.

But you can have this one, because some enterprising Internet Archive user has gathered dozens of these S. S. Kresge recordings, along with training films and other paraphernalia, in a collection called, perhaps inevitably, “Attention K-Mart Shoppers.”

WRITING PROMPT.

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Do you want to write a Gothic novel? Here is your writing prompt, from the portfolio of a local architect:

“The difficulty of raising an autistic or special needs child is what to do as they grow older.  For this family, the solution was to give their autistic son space of his own in the attic.”

Take it from there.