I have been writing my story.
This is keeping me utterly gripped.
I am not gripped by the excitingness of my story. In fact this is an element which is noticeably lacking at the moment, it most certainly is not the sort of tale with a murder in the first line, anybody seeking a thriller will have to look elsewhere.
The thing is that it is a story set a couple of hundred years in the future. I do not feel as though it deserves the label Science Fiction, because to earn such a label implies that Science has some bearing on the subject, which given my general ignorance of all things scientific, as my GCSE chemistry teacher could have attested, is really not likely to happen. Science had better not feature very much indeed, if at all.
However, it has led me down some fascinating exploratory rabbit holes. I have decided to give my characters the wonderful benefit of being waited on by robots, which I think is the most fortunate good luck, I envy them, I wish I had one. In consequence I have been trying to work out where robotic science is going, and what is the likely outcome for a couple of hundred years hence.
It turns out that we do not want our robots to be dignified and authoritative. After considerable detailed research, the current conclusion that the world’s greatest robotic brains have reached is that we prefer our robots to be smaller than us, unthreatening and cute. They have rounded heads and large eyes, and don’t look quite like people, because we don’t like them when they do.
Children like them to be furry, which sounds horrid.
I was intrigued at this discovery and promptly disappeared down the vortex of philosophy that is currently wondering whether we should program them to have feelings or not. It turns out that there are plenty of excellent arguments either way, all culminating in the question of whether AI is real and sentient or whether we just want to believe it is.
It seems that we do want to believe it is. I can entirely sympathise with this. Regular readers will remember my heartfelt distress at the demise of the poor sad camper van.
The conclusion seems to be that we will never know if AI is conscious, mostly because we don’t have the first idea what consciousness actually is, nor how it got there in the first place. I Think Therefore I Am could equally be applied both to me and to a computer, although possibly not to Google in the television, who really can be exceptionally dopey at times.
Possibly not to me either for a great deal of the time, if I am honest, you don’t need a massively exercised brain to hoover the bathroom and stack piles of logs.
I was pleased with this contemplation, not least because it means I can make up absolutely anything I like for the robots in my story, and it is just as probable as anything else.
Incidentally, talking of stories, I have now sold a few copies of Clive and the Dragon on Amazon, not enough for me to take early retirement, but enough for me to buy a couple of bunches of bananas and some apples next time I go to Booths, so if you bought one, thank you very much, I will think of you when I eat my taxi picnic.
Apart from literary contemplation, which really is just another word for time-wasting, things are ticking along peacefully here. Mark comes home next week, so I am trying to create peaceful domestic order and also make sure that he does not have to go straight off out and start sawing up firewood. I have been trying to be economical with it, and am burning up some fairly rubbish stuff which has been lurking at the bottom of the heap for ages. This is so rubbish that when I got up this morning the fire had gone out. Not burned out, just flickered and faded and expired, leaving a pile of unsmouldered, slightly blackened chunks in the grate when I inspected it.
Fortunately it is not too cold today, so I was not tearfully shivering with self-pity, and merely cursed and hunted out some Amazon packaging.
It has stayed lit ever since, which is a blessing. I piled it high before I came out to work, and am hoping that it will still be there when I come home.
There is no companion like a good hot fire.
Maybe one day I will even get a robot to carry in the logs.
