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I write because I must. I feel that I must.
The little red dot on my mic app blinks, soundlessly inviting me to speak. I hope you can't hear the beeping on the recording. The screen ticks, 0:13, 0:14, 0:15. . .
"What Mental has done with their Odyssey 3 is, all at once, the convergence of dozens of disparate narrative throughlines, and the birth of thousands more. What they aim to do is even larger."
Why do I write? What's the point of writing anymore? Do I thrash and keen out of a sense of defiance or hope? Is there some indeterminate deadline before which I need to say everything needs saying? Or am I just a klaxon, blaring dumbly before disaster, raising the collective blood pressure over something that can't be changed or diverted? Zach asked me to write this piece personally, gave me all the resources I could ask for to do so. I even have a front row seat at MentalCon. What for?
"The Odyssey 3's killer app, Experience Generator 5.0, i.e. E.G.5 is the cornerstone of the whole thing. We've come a long way since the chatbots and image generators of the 20s. This evolutionary branch promises limitless entertainment, post-scarcity with caveat, and with none of the worries surrounding more traditional, more capable AI. How lucky!
Books, movies, video games, they all pluck at different strings to facilitate their escapism. This next step, what Mental wants to term experiences, is the culmination of facade. We all know how many words a picture is worth. Mental has increased our wordly throughput several million fold. How much further can we take it before we hit saturation?
Our media has long tantalized us with images of flying cars, hoverboards, spaceships, and other sci-fi set dressing that, it turns out, has been orders of magnitude easier to write about, 3D model, or code than it has been to implement in real life; physics is a bitch. Thinking outside Pandora's box, Mental obviated the problem entirely by creating a system with its own physics, one significantly more amenable to our imaginations. And for the last few weeks I've been demoing it, I've felt sated."
Why does anyone write? What promotes inane thought to inane ejaculation that now needs to be stored in three different data centers, on three different continents, just so in the off chance nuclear war erupts between North America and Asia savvy consumers can route to eu-central-1 to read eight hundred reviews of a toaster or XR headset? What promotes inane ejaculation to something of any small merit?
It's often said that luck is opportunity meeting preparation. It's lucky that English has become the language of imagination. Perhaps I write to better delegate my fantasies. Second brain, indeed. Or perhaps it's to codify experience and imagination for the next generation of AI. Then it, in turn, can use those experiences to more convincingly pad holes in my own lived experience, to write me into things I have never or will never experience, to write things never actually experienced. To do so convincingly enough to pass muster but so surface level so as to buff out any texture. A feed for the further generation of AI, continue ad infinitum , until AI trained on AI tinted inputs recurses down to the Great American Novel or the Human Condition. That is, if you allow that the human condition is perfectly smooth. Experiences so plentiful they're give a penny, take a penny.
"The Great American Novel. Many novels have some claim to the title, but none have fully pulled away with that designation, as far as it's possible to be given and received. And now none ever will. The time has passed for writing anything so corporeal. I believe that we've entered the age of a more perfect entertainment. The Great American Novel would want to mean something to everyone. E.G.5 means everything to someone. My 'experiences' mean nothing to you. My dead fiance, given form again, means nothing to you, but everything to me."
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How can I hear that stupid thing so clearly from the bottom of my sock drawer?
"You've probably read Lightning Rod's expose by now. Mental's hush hush plan to sell you back your dead loved ones. You want Gramps to live forever? Just buy him an Odyssey 3 and let Mental train and fine tune on him, the more accurate. Hope you're ready for all those tech support calls! What a scoop! What an uproar!
If you'll oblige me my tinfoil hat, what a masterful PR move. Mental has been, understandably, extremely secretive about the whole thing. I had free reign of the place and even I only found out about it through a set of relatively unique-to-me circumstances, but somehow a bunch of techno-evangelists get ahold of it and leak it. They love it, they just take issue with some of the details. Cries of 'open source it,' 'walled garden,' and 'non-competitive behavior,' in between gushing over GamGam. Takes the wind out of the sails of, say, anyone who's been forced to grapple with such a technology and its ramifications since the first night they used it. The narrative has already been seeded, the shock and awe extracted, the obligate partisan partitioning playing out. Pundits are already furiously hashing out whether it's Progressive or Conservative in nature. The dry horror of reanimation, provided your person of fixation died within the last twenty years and Mental's EULA, that's secondary."
I blow away parts of my brain. I hate that paragraph. I hate the parts and weights that contributed to it. They dropout, shake, rattle and resettle with chemical inspiration into something more palatable. I'm not sure what heuristics I use to measure the stress and weight each line can bear, and I certainly have no head for rhythm, but I seem to do okay. More than okay. It's something I'm good at. Every word is a function of our self, a sampling of short and long term memories, stylings, influences, etc. The function must tend to infinity when the inputs are infinite? Austerity might not be the enemy.
Vanity is a nonzero part of it, though not in the sense of acclaim. This is as poor a route as any one can take towards legacy. It's rather an act of worship. There's a veneration of self. To the reader it's chiral at best but to the writer it's better than a trail of breadcrumbs for finding your way back to whoever wrote your piece. Fittingly in line with the subject of the piece. Do thousands of bite sized, 140 character thoughts mosaic into something comprehensive? Do essays, stories, books? What composites better for scrubbing through the timeline of my life?
"The more we've ceded to technology the more powerful its wielders have become, but few would call their power Godlike. The line may blur after this. What are the new rules? Marc 18:3, 'Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little consumers, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven 2.0.' Zachariah 6:20, 'Blessed are you who are profligate in your use, for yours is the kingdom of God.' Will our new list of commandments require us to scroll to the bottom and click 'I agree' after every update? To whom should we attribute? They should have called it Babel."
I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Inoculation, maybe?
"Real life narratives are emergent properties, borne out of untold numbers of interactions and often only identified in retrospect with words like 'arcs,' 'turning points,' 'rock bottoms.' Constructed narratives have the order reversed. A place for everything, everything in its place. 'A gun in act one must go off by act three,' etc. That gun takes up space in one of Mental's datacenters, after all, and shareholders can't abide waste. What do we lose to such a switch if we give more and more of our time to these constructions?"
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Shut the fuck up Jay.