Years ago, life turned into a slow-motion car crash and it’s me taken longer than expected to walk away from the wreckage.
Where am I? What am I doing? What do I need to do? What am I working with?
All questions I’ve been asking, and as I’ve stumbled through that wreckage, I’ve picked up a few pieces in an attempt to reconstruct some of what I once had.
I’ve managed to rebuild the website, and the plan is to make this the platform it was supposed to have been in the first place … before the crash.
I’m working on Engines of Chaos (what was called Chaos Engine), and while nearing the end, I’ve had an idea about how to make the ending a bit different — but I won’t spoil the surprise.
Engines of Chaos would be entering a crowded space of stories about emergent AI, but I’ve long since rejected the “AI goes rogue” trope. We’ve created synthetic intelligences based on data models that are the sum total of human knowledge — in effect, these AI are us, to varying degrees, and in spite of our myriad failures as a species, we’re also aspirational in nature.
In the last few weeks I’ve been active writing elsewhere — reflecting on the challenges of writing in the age of artificial intelligence — which I had contemplated writing here, but because this website was borked at the time and the fact the article I had in mind was to be a showcase of Under Cloud, I’ve shared it here and I’ll leave you to it.
What I’ve been through has reminded me of the meta analysis of so-called brain training apps that, in spite of the bold claims, succeed at training the brain to perform better at brain training apps and nothing else. What I’ve learned from what I’ve been through has made me better at handling the experience of extreme loss and the trauma of actual death and destruction, the exact type of experience I don’t want to repeat.
But, I survived so let’s see where this goes.