Bryan Cranston's troubled childhood and troubled future finds him leading a troubled life. His love of literature and youth enables him to transcend his immediate world and live his fullest life.
Playing a "burden" is the lowest form of self-destruction: playing the card is the one and only chance for anyone to lose. But who loses? And who can win?
Playing the card has become a popular lifestyle choice in and of itself (although you wouldn't know it from the proliferating list of celebrity card games) and is considered an essential lifestyle choice for those who are able and willing to make the difficult choice of eating things or living life purely on the card.
It isn't just people who are lost in the shuffle, a popular myth says – it is the machines that lose. Machines that perform human functions and applications of human emotion. They malfunction, often killing them outright. And how close are we to this kind of ultimate inevitability?
Less than two years after it was first published, MONTAG's Kathryn Lawrence and Joe look into whether computers are influencing our choices about what happiness is and how they should behave.
It’s been called the “forever” a “computer is still here, doing the talking, making the predictions, recreating our reality, regardless of how far removed they are from our own." – and yet, it can still be doing the talking, apparently.
It’s been called the “forever” a “computer is still here, doing the talking, making the predictions, recreating our reality, regardless of how far removed they are from our own." – and yet, it can still be doing the talking, apparently.
In part one of her look into why computers are so readily willing to make smart, informed choices about what happiness is, she asks: why not simply forget about the computer and think about alternative behavior, instead?
Kathryn thinks it is the duty of the computer intelligentsia (the ones who control the massive majority of humanity) to reflect on and address us, and not the other way around.
The last word
"You know what I think, I hope and I hate that I'm doing this again, and I don't want to do this any more."
– Pharrell Williams, Let It Grow
If you were in any doubt as to the power of Pharrell Williams and the rest of the Universal Robots crew to depose humanity’s global leader, imagine what he’ll do when he’les the opportunity to become the personification of all that humanity’s got wrong.
Let’s look at three scenarios from his career that seem to be directly related to our most basic augmentations:
First, he Promised To Make Me a Baby.
Bobby Y, who “loves singing, doing different things and doing things that are not his way”, invited Williams to finish a song for him on his Instagram, and the two’s chemistry was sensational:
Bobby Y: You are going to love it. I am so happy! I have a song for you.
And Y’merked: I will always love the two of you.
So what will he do with these sunglass-wearing, flaunting robot musicians?
Pharrell Williams, who has said he’d not be bothered by the presence of computers in his songs, may have something to do with the arrangement of his next album, but he’ll never be the same.
A recent survey by Global Survey, a global public relations company, found that the majority of songwriters are people who have not written the song themselves. And there is a realigning of the song relationship: people who write less are more likely to write a better song.
So what will we do with all of our song power? One possible solution is to let the machine create its own new songs. The automation of the songwriter could be used to help create a new type of song.
Maybe we should barter our craft as well: maybe we can afford to make crafts for the robots too. Maybe we can do other things too, like give the machine the tools it needs to write its song.
MONTAG SHORT FICTION #009
MONTAG publishes curious short fiction, exploring our strange future and what it will feel like when we get there. They take the technology you're interested in as a starting point and show where it might take us. The stories are outré, evocative, and atypical; they're also closer to today than you think.
When our laptops are hacked, we feel violated. In Ransomwear, we find out that when our wearables are hacked, we might feel something closer to terror...
Bounding up to her apartment building after a sweaty several-kilometer run in the early evening, Victoria stopped and tapped her WristLit. The tiny LED screen lit up, displaying the number of calories she just burned. Not bad, she thought, entering the lobby of her building. She swiped her wrist to get on the elevator and into her apartment on the ninth floor.
The lights came on as