ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.

Primitive airplane with crowd of spectators

On this day in 1905, Mr. Ambrose Caulk of Brooklyn attempted to demonstrate a new airplane of his own invention, with tragic results. In spite of a valiant effort from the engine and propellers, the machine moved only six yards forward before collapsing in a heap, whereupon, according to the coroner’s report, two spectators on the ground died laughing.

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THINGS TO DO.

Come see the Grant Borough Arts & Quilting Council’s Art Show at the Borough Building at Grant & State. This year we are blessed with over eight artists, of whom seven have painted characteristic Grant Borough scenes, such as the Food Festival at Grant & Lignery, and the Borough Building at Grant & State. The eighth artist is a weirdo and no one understands his paintings, but he seems nice, and maybe you could buy something small from him to show him we’re broadminded. And there’s a guy selling handmade wooden spoons, and we’ve decided to call that art, so we have over eight artists. Also, there will be quilts. The show runs from now until Mrs. Gill the cleaning lady gets tired of it and throws everybody out.

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SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS ANSWERED.

How much does water weigh?

Water weighs as much as it likes. There is no use trying to put water on a diet.

If I gathered together seventy-five discarded phones with working batteries, would I have enough power to build a Bluetooth death ray?

Probably. But it is likely that it would kill only people who are wearing headphones or earbuds, and thus it would be of limited utility.

Is there any way to demagnetize an owl?

Owls are not generally magnetic. If your owl has become magnetized, it may be a symptom of a deeper problem. Consult a veterinarian with a specialty in avian electromagnetism.

What are the health effects of sarcasm?

Sarcasm leads to robust health and well-being, because obviously people who approach every human contact with an inflexible sneer are both living happy lives themselves and spreading happiness to the people around them, so that no one could possibly ever want to beat them to death.

If an anaconda swallows itself, does it get any fatter?

No. It remains exactly the same size. Anacondas are in fact entirely self-sustaining, and predation is nothing but a hobby for them.

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BOTSTYLE.

It is always good fun to make predictions about our friends who are artificially intelligent and then watch the predictions not come true, and that is all the excuse we need for offering another one.

An email correspondent mentioned that she had been a bit put out when AI invaded her email. She had been ready to write a reply to a message from Dr. Boli when she saw that Google’s pet bot had already drafted a complete reply for her, plausibly human-sounding, and the bot offered to send the message off with one click and zero actual input from the putative author of the response. Is this the future? she asked. Will it soon be impossible to tell whether our correspondents have actually read and replied to our messages, or whether they have just let the bot do all their thinking and pressed the button without even reading their own replies?

Dr. Boli thought for a little while, and then gave opposite answers to the two questions. Yes, he wrote back, this is the future. More and more people will simply push the button and allow the bot to do all their thinking for them, because most people find thinking an unrewarding slog and will be glad to be relieved of that responsibility. But for that very reason it will be easy to tell which messages have been written by bots. They will all sound alike.

Right now, the purveyors of botty services emphasize how well the bots can imitate you. They learn your style, we are told; they write in your voice.

And that is true now to a certain extent. Large language models work by predicting what word is likely to come next. Give one access to all your accumulated emails and other writings, and by simple statistics it will start to sound like you.

But that depends on your having an archive of writings that come out of your own brain. Suppose you are one of the large majority who will be happy to accept whatever the bot writes and declare it good enough. From this point on, almost all your communications will be written by the bot. As time goes on, these botty effusions will form the majority of the communications that have gone out under your name. Older messages will fall victim to the various forces that cause old data to crumble away, and eventually your own unbotted writing will have vanished from the universe. The bot’s only models for “your voice” will be the things the bot itself has written.

This is a feedback loop, and a feedback loop always ends in a high-pitched squeal.

More and more of the world’s writing will consist of bots replying to bots. They will learn from themselves and each other, and they will all sound alike.

In the field of software documentation, this has already happened. Look at the descriptions of new projects on GitHub; look at the changelogs; look at the user manuals. They are all written by bots, with few exceptions, and they all speak in the same voice. And it is a distinctive voice. You quickly learn to recognize it.

That is the future of communication. It will separate the human writers from the bots very neatly, but—as we have already seen in the world of technical writing—the human writers will be hobbyists. Bots will be considered necessary for professional communication.

That is not necessarily a dismal future. Think how much you treasure a handmade sweater or quilt that no machine could ever duplicate. Messages you receive from people who care enough to write their own words will be messages you treasure the same way. Likewise, if you are one of the small number of people who still prefer to communicate in their own words, you will be regarded as a kind of prodigy. It will not increase you chances of remunerative employment any more than the ability to crochet an exquisite shawl will increase them. But it will earn you a kind of social awe, and that is worth more than employment in the long run.

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MRS. CHESWICK’S EDUCATIONAL STORIES FOR CHILDREN.

A long time ago there was a blue jay, but not really that long ago when you think about it, because after all birds didn’t evolve till the Jurassic period, and that’s practically last week compared to the Big Bang, but anyway it was a while ago, but how long isn’t really important unless he owes back taxes. And this blue jay’s name was Jonathan Jamison Jehoshaphat Julian Jambudvipa Jenkins Jay, but everyone just called him Mr. Blue. Now, one day Mr. Blue was out walking his dog, which is hard for a blue jay, but he managed it somehow. And by the way, if you were wondering what the dog’s name was, he was called Red, which was odd because he was a black lab, and personally I think it must have been some kind of joke, naming a black lab Red, don’t you? But anyway, Mr. Blue was out walking Red when they met an orange tabby cat named Blackie. And Blackie was nonplussed, because on the one hand he wanted to chase the bird, but on the other hand the bird had a big dog. So Blackie just walked on by, and that was the last they ever saw of him. So they kept on walking, and they came to their favorite coffeehouse at the corner of Maple and Fitzsimmons, and Red the dog said, “I’ll have a pork latte and a peanut for my bird.” And it turned out that Red was the master and Jonathan Jamison Jehoshaphat Julian Jambudvipa Jay was the pet all the time! And with a name like that! Isn’t that amazing? It just goes to show you.

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