![]() ![]() Maya, Dev, and their fellow x-engs were part of an informal but vibrant kaleidoscopic menagerie – x-engs and poets and artists and scientists and chefs and explorers – pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and capability in the face of the siren call of abundance. Maya was among them, lured into the captivating chaos by her older brother Dev nearly a decade prior. Degrees in the field had lost their relevance, as the craft captured the hearts and minds of countless self-made engineers of all stripes - bio, nano, mech, chem, aero, mat, terra – and every permutation and fusion in between. Once a respected and serious profession, it had evolved into something more akin to a global hobby for the self-taught, inquisitive, and restless. The LegalDDoS of 2027 only hastened the LawBots' dominance the barrage of human-filed lawsuits against them forced the notoriously Luddite courts to employ legions of LawBots themselves. Kaiser Permanente San Diego Medical Center case, practicing medicine without the assistance of DocBots was a one-way ticket to a med mal L at the hands of, naturally, the LawBots. ![]() Close call.Īfter 2029’s landmark Garcia v. If she had been born a generation earlier, as a half-Indian, her parents would have nudged her into a career as a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. Over her thirty-six years, so many intellectual skills joined physical ones in going the way of the pole vault. The pinball that was the idea ricocheted around her brain, picking up wisps and tidbits, picking up momentum. They did it because it was fun, because it gave them something to root for and strive towards, and because they could. And so, every four years, the world gathered to celebrate those who retained these abilities best. ![]() Humans had earned these skills from evolutionary necessity, and they were no longer very necessary, but they persisted in our bodies. Geep offered Maya cap after cap of ancient contests, yet she failed to find a single one with practical value. The hunt for sustenance, assuming grocery stores were absent, would have been better served by a shotgun rather than a javelin. Įven in 1996, a car would have been the superior choice for traversing 26.2 miles, and a boat would have effortlessly outpaced any human swimmer across 400 meters. To her, it seemed the Olympics were a celebration of physical prowess honed over eons and rendered practically obsolete by the rise of machines. “What was the point of the Olympics?” Ping. Maya was entranced by the cap of a very old Olympics – 1996, Atlanta, marked by the bomb and the unforgettable image of Kerri Strug sticking the landing – and she got to thinking. If you like the story and want to collect it, I published it on Mirror too: Collect. I may or may not have used AI enhancements in telling it. I’m sure there are a bunch of loose fragments of other ideas floating in here too.Īnyway, the idea for this story was an Organic Human Idea™️. It’s a continuation of The Enchanted Notebook, which I wrote back in September, before things got really weird plays off of John Palmer’s Idea Guy meme it’s inspired by Asimov’s The Last Question, Banks’ Player of Games, all the tweets, posts, and podcasts about what humans will do when we don’t have to do much, about watching the Olympics as a kid back when everyone watched the Olympics, and thoughts about what the world will look like when my kids are older. I’m not sure exactly how the idea for this particular story came about – identifying all of the inspirations is as difficult as untangling the images that go into a Stable Diffusion output or the sources that feed ChatGPT’s responses – but I know a few of the things that bounced around in my brain, collided, and turned into this story. It’s about something that humans are still best at, and that I think we’ll remain best at for a long time: generating fresh ideas, the genesis sparks that set the machines in motion. This first foray is about something a lot of people are very worried about but that I’m pretty excited by: humans’ place in the world in the face of AI’s growing capabilities. I mentioned before that I wanted to start writing some short sci-fi about our portfolio companies, but I don’t want them to be the victims of my poor first attempts, so I’m going with a less specific one today. Happy Wednesday! Sorry this one’s a little delayed – I got knocked out by a cold last week, and writing fiction is much harder than I thought!įiction? Things have been moving very fast recently, and while serious analysis can be useful, fiction can be an equally potent way to explore where all of this is heading. ![]()
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