Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)

I mean, I just got done watching a presentation at Google Next where the presenter talked to an AI agent and set up a landscaping appointment with price match and a person could intervene to approve the price match.

It's cool, sure, but understand, that agent would absolutely have been a person on a phone five years ago, and if you replace them with agentic AI, that doesn't mean that person has gone away or is now free to write poetry. It means they're out of an income and benefits. And that's before you consider the effects on the pool of talent you're drawing from when you're looking for someone to intervene on behalf of these agentic AIs, like that supervisor did when they approved the price match. If you don't have the entry-level person, you don't have them five years later when you want to promote someone to manage.

Saying that, a variant of Susan Calvin role could prove to be useful today.

Asimov says in this that there are things computers will be good at, and things humans will be good at. By embracing that complementary relationship, we can advance as a society and be free to do the things that only humans can do.

That is definitely how I wish things were going. But it's becoming clear that within a few more years, computers will be far better at absolutely everything than human beings could ever be. We are not far even now from a prompt accepting a request such as "Write a another volume of the Foundation series, in the style of Isaac Asimov", and getting a complete novel that does not need editing, does not need review, and is equal to or better than the quality of the original novels.

When that goal is achieved, what then are humans "for"? Humans need purpose, and we are going to be in a position where we don't serve any purpose. I am worried about what will become of us after we have made ourselves obsolete.

>Just saw a demo of a new word processor system that lets a manager dictate straight into the machine, and it prints the memo without a secretary ever touching it. Slick stuff. But five years ago, that memo would’ve gone through a typist. Replace her with a machine, and she’s not suddenly editing novels from home. She’s unemployed, losing her paycheck and benefits.

And when that system malfunctions, who’s left who actually knows how to fix it or manage the workflow? You can’t promote experience that never existed. Strip out the entry-level roles, and you cut off the path to leadership.

AI _researchers_ had a different idea of what AI would be like, as they were working on symbolic AI, but in the popular imagination, "AI" was a computer that acted and thought like a human.

That's capitalism for ye :/ Join us on the UBI train.

Say, have you ever read the book 'Bullshit Jobs'...

Comparative advantage. Even if that's true, AI can't possibly do _everything_. China is better at manufacturing pretty much anything than most countries on earth, but that doesn't mean China is the only country in the world that does manufacturing.

Folding laundry

The three laws of robotics seemed ridiculous until 2021, when it became clear that you could just give AI general firm guidelines and let them work out the details (and ways to evade the rules) from there.

The Star Trek computer is not like LLMs: a) it provides reliable answers, b) it is capable of reasoning, c) it is capable of actually interacting with its environment in a rational manner, d) it is infallible unless someone messes with it. Each one of these points is far in the future of LLMs.

Why not? There's the human bias of wanting to consume things created by humans - that's fine, I'm not questioning that - but objectively, if we get to human-threshold AGI and continue scaling, there's no reason why it couldn't do everything, and better.

If you are a fan of the foundation books, recall that many of the leaders of various factions were a bunch of idiots little different than the carnival barkers we see today.

The 2025 equivalent of the secretary is potentially looking across a job market that is far smaller because the labor she was trained to do, or labor similar enough to it that she could have previously successfully been hired, is now handled by artificial intelligence.

There is, effectively, no where for her to go to earn a living with her labor.

Can an AI novel add something new to the conversation of literature? That's less clear to me because it is so hard to get any model I work with to truly stand by its convictions.

The people with all of the money effectively froze wages for 45 years, and that was when there were people actually doing labor for them.

What makes you think that they'll peaceably agree to UBI for people who don't sell them labor for money?

- The world already hosts millions of organic AI (Actual Intelligence). Many statistically at genius-level IQ. Does their existence make you obsolete?

Call center based services always suck. I remember going to a talk where American Express, who operated best in class call centers, found that 75% of their customers don’t want to talk to them. The people are there because that’s needed for a complex relationship, the more stuff you can address earlier in the funnel, the better.

Customers don’t want to talk to you, and ultimately serving the customer is the point.

A perfect time for LLMs to show up and do the same. The subreddit simulators were hilarious because of the unusual ways they would perform but a modern LLM is a near perfect approximation of the average HN commenter.

I would have assumed that making LLMs indistinguishable from these humans would make those kinds of comments less interesting to interact with but there’s a base level of conversation that hooks people.

On Twitter, LLM-equipped Indians cosplay as right wing white supremacists and amass large followings (also bots, perhaps?) revealed only when they have to participate in synchronous conversation.

And yet, they are still popular. Even the “Texas has warm water ports” Texan is still around and has a following (many of whom seem non-bot though who can tell?).

Even though we have a literal drone, humans still engage in drone behaviour and other humans still engage them. Fascinating. I wonder whether the truth is that the inherent past-replication of low-temperature LLMs is likely to fix us to our present state than to raise us to a new equilibrium.

Experiments in Musical Intelligence is now over 40 years old and I thought it was going to revolutionize things: unknown melodies discovered by machine married to mind. Maybe LLMs aren’t going to move us forward only because this point is already a strong attractor. I’m optimistic in the power of boredom, though!

This is all theoretical, I don’t know if I believe that we as humans can overcome our desire to hoard and fight over our possessions.

AIs aren't really part of the whole evolutionary race for survival so far. We create them. And we allow them to run. And then we shut them down. Maybe there will be some AI enhanced people that start doing better. And maybe the people bit become optional at some point. At that point you might argue we've just morphed/evolved into whatever that is.

We already live lives which are artificial in almost every way. People used to die of physical exhaustion and malnutrition, now they die of lack of exercise and gluttony, surely we could have stopped somewhere in the middle. It's not a ressource or technology problem at that point, it's societal/political

The upshot of this is that LLMs are quite good at the stuff that he thinks only humans will be able to do. What they aren't so good at (yet) is really rigorous reasoning, exactly the opposite of what 20th century people assumed.

This complementarity already exists in our brains. We have evolutionary older parts of brain that deal with our basic needs through emotions and evolutionary younger neocortex that deals with rational thought. They have complicated relationship, both can influence our actions, through mutual interaction. Morality is managed by both, neither of them is necessarily more "humane" than the other.

In my view, AI will be just another layer, an additional neocortex. Our biological neocortex is capable of tracking un/cooperative behavior of around 100 people of the tribe, and allows us to learn couple useful skills for life.

The "personal AI neocortex" will track behavior of 8 billion people on the planet, and will have mastery of all known skills. It is gonna change humans for the better, I have little doubt about it.

Depends on your definition of "intelligence." No, they can't reliably navigate the physical world or have long-term memories like cats or dogs do. Yes, they can outperform them on intellectual work in the written domain.

> Does their existence make you obsolete?

Imagine if for everything you tried to do, there was someone else who could do it better, no matter what domain, no matter where you were, and no matter how hard you tried. You are not an economically viable member of society. Some could deal with that level of demoralisation, but many won't.

"we" don't control ourselves. If humans can't find enough energy sources in 2200 it doesn't mean they won't do it in 1950.

It would be pretty bad to lose access to energy after having it, worse than never having it IMO.

The amount of new technologies discovered in the past 100 years (which is a tiny amount of time) is insane and we haven't adapted to it, not in a stable way.

Yep. And they didn't accomplish that 'peaceably' either, for the record. A lot of people got murdered, many more smeared/threatened/imprisoned etc. Entire countries get decimated.

> What makes you think that they'll peaceably agree to UBI for people who don't sell them labor for money?

I don't imagine for a moment that they'll like UBI. There is no shortage of examples over recent millenia of how far the parasite class will go to keep the status quo.

History also shows us that having all the money doesn't guarantee that people will do things your way. Class awareness, strikes, unions, protest, and alternative systems/technological advance have shown their mettle. These things scare oligarchs because they work.

Watched all seasons recently for the first time. While some things are "just" vector search with a voice interface, there are also goodies like "Computer, extrapolate from theoretical database!", or "Create dance partner, female!" :D

For anyone curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CDhEwhOm44

Extreme poverty decreased, child mortality decreased, literacy and access to electricity has gone up.

Are people unhappier? Maybe. But not because they lack something materially.

In practice I fear that the savings will make the rich richer, drive down labour's negotiating power and generally fail to elevate our standard of living.

So did ELIZA. So did SmarterChild. Chatbots are not exactly a new technology. LLMs are at best a new cog in that same old functionality—but nothing has fundamentally made them more reliable or useful. The last 90% of any chatbot will involve heavy usage of heuristics with both approaches. The main difference is some of the heuristics are (hopefully) moved into training.

Multivac in "the last question"?

But I doubt most people would subscribe to that view now and would say Photography is an entirely new art form.

They occasionally allowed the people who actually make things to become wealthy in order to incentivize other people who make things to continue making things, but mostly it's just the people with lots of money (and the lawyers) who make most of the money.

Studios and publishers and platforms somehow convinced everyone that the "service" and "marketing" they provided was worth a vast majority of the revenue creative works created.

This system should be burned to the ground and reset, and any indirect parties should be legally limited to at most 15% of the total revenues generated by a creative work. We're about to see Hollywood quality AI video - the cost of movie studios, music, literature, and images is nominal. There are already creative AI series and ongoing works that beat 90's level visual effects and storyboarding being created and delivered via various platforms for free (although the exposure gets them ad revenue.)

We better figure this stuff out, fast, or it's just going to be endless rentseeking by rich people and drama from luddites.

I would argue patents are closer to protecting ideas, and those are alive and well.

I do agree copyright law is terribly outdated but I also feel the pain of the creatives.

I don't see much difference—you still have to take any output skeptically. I can't claim to have ever used gemini, but last I checked it still can't cite sources, which would at least assist with validation.

I'm just saying this didn't introduce any fundamentally new capabilities—we've always been able to GIGO-excuse all chatbots. The "soft" applications of LLMs have always been approximated by heuristics (e.g. generation of content of unknown use or quality). Even the summarization tech LLMs seem to offer don't seem to substantially improve over the NLP-heuristic-driven predecessors.

But yea, if you really want to generate content of unknown quality, this is a massive leap. I just don't see this as very interesting.

(To be clear, I have no problem with AI-generated music. I think a lot of the commenters would be surprised to hear of its origin, though.)

I think it is heading in this direction, just takes a very long time. 50% of people are dumber than average

“I don't like cleaning or dusting or cooking or doing dishes, or any of those things," I explained to her. "And I don't usually do it. I find it boring, you see."

"Everyone has to do those things," she said.

"Rich people don't," I pointed out.

Juniper laughed, as she often did at things I said in those early days, but at once became quite serious.

"They miss a lot of fun," she said. "But quite apart from that--keeping yourself clean, preparing the food you are going to eat, clearing it away afterward--that's what life's about, Wise Child. When people forget that, or lose touch with it, then they lose touch with other important things as well."

"Men don't do those things."

"Exactly. Also, as you clean the house up, it gives you time to tidy yourself up inside--you'll see.”

Yes, it can cite sources, just like any other major LLM service out there. Gemini, Claude, Deepseek, and ChatGPT are the ones I personally validated this with, but I bet other major LLM services can do so as well.

Just tested this using Gemini with “Is fluoride good for teeth? Cite sources for any of the claims” prompt, and it listed every claim as a bullet point accompanied by the corresponding source. The sources were links to specific pages addressing the claims from CDC, Cleveland Clinic, John Hopkins, and NIDCR. I clicked on each of the links to verify that they were corroborating what Gemini response was saying, and they were.

In fact, it would more often than not include sources even without me explicitly asking for sources.

> they are arguably no worse than 99% of what the commercial music business has been pumping out for years

Correct, and that says a lot about our society.

Sure, patent trolls suck, so do MAFIAA, but a world where creators have no means to subsist, where everything you do will be captured by AI corps without your permission, just to be regurgitated into a model for a profit, sucks way way more

Travel 75 to 150 miles outside of a US city and it will feel like time travel. If so much is still 100 years behind, how will civilization so broadly adopt something that is yet more decades into the future?

I got into starlink debates with people during hurricane helene. Folks were glowing over how people just needed internet. Reality, internet meant fuck all when what you needed was someone with a chainsaw, a generator, heater, blankets, diapers and food.

Which is to say, technology and its importance is a thin veneer on top of organized society. All of which is frail and still has a long way to go to fully penetrate rural communities for even recent technology. At the same time, that spread is less important than it would seem to a technologist. Hence, technology has not uniformly spread everywhere, and ultimately it is not that important. Yet, how will AI, even more futuristic, leap frog this? My money is that rural towns USA will look almost identical in 30 years from now. Many look identical to 100 years ago still.

I remember that from a couple of years ago, when Stable Diffusion came out. There was a lot of talk about "art" and "AI" and someone posted a collection of articles / interviews / opinion pieces about this exact same thing - painting vs. cameras.

Read some philosophy. People have been wrestling with this question forever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

In the end, all we have is each other. Volunteer, help others.

Has anyone heard a viable solution, or even has one themselves?

I don’t hear anything about UBI anymore, could that be because after roughly 60+ million alien people flooding into western countries from countries with a populations so large that are effectively endless? What do we do about that? Will that snuff out any kind of advancement in the west when the roughly 6 billion people all want to be in the west where everyone gets UBI and it’s the land of milk and honey?

So what do we do then? We can’t all be tech industry people with 6-figure plus salaries, vested ownership, and most people aren’t multi-millionaires that can live far away from the consequences while demanding others subject themselves to them.

Which way?

Alfred Bester's "The stars my destination" stands out as a shining counterpoint in this era. You don't get much character development like that in other works until the sixties imo.

Another possibility is not let us scale. I thought Logan's Run was a very interesting take on this.

This is a pretty good definition, honestly. It explains the AI Effect quite well: calculators aren’t “AI” because it’s been a while since humans were the only ones who could do arithmetic. At one point they were, though.

LLM's are just the latest form of "AI" that, for a change, doesn't quite fit Asimov's mold. Perhaps it's because they're being designed to replace humans in creative tasks rather than liberate humans to pursue them.

I want everyone to have food, housing, healthcare, education, etc. in a post scarcity world. That should be possible. I don’t think giving people cash is the best way to accomplish that. If you want people to have housing, give them housing. If you want people to have food, give them food.

Cash doesn’t solve the supply problem, as we can see with housing now. You would think a rise in the cost of housing would lead to more supply, but the cost of real estate also increases the cost of building.

Struggling to find the words but the synthetic voice directly addressing the prompt is really surreal feeling.

It would be very interesting to see the percentage breakdowns of how such people chose to spend their time. In my opinion, there would be enough benefit to society at large to make it worthwhile. For a large group (if not the majority), I'm certain the situation would turn out to be completely temporary-- they would have the option to prepare themselves for some type of work they're better adapted to perform and/or enjoy, ultimately enhancing the culture and economy. Most of the rest could be useful as research subjects, if they were willing of course.

Obviously this is a bit of a utopian fantasy, but what can I say, Star Trek primed me to hope for such a future.

https://show.franzai.com/a/tiny-queen-zebu

That's the problem with being nostalgic for something you possibly didn't even live. You don't remember all the other ugly complexities that don't fit your idealized vision.

Nothing about the world of the sci fi golden age was less exploitative or prone to human misery than it is today. If anything, it was far worse than what we have today in many ways (excluding perhaps the reach of the surveillance state)

Some of the US government's worst secret experiments against the population come from that same time and the naive faith by the population in their "leaders" made propaganda by centralized big media outlets all the more pervasively powerful. At the same time, social miseries were common and so too were many strictures against many more people on economic and social opportunities. As for technology being used for good purposes, bear in mind that among many other nasty things being done, the 50's and 60s were a time in which several governments flagrantly tested thousands of nukes out in the open, in the skies, above-ground and in the oceans with hardly a care in the world or any serious public scrutiny. If you're looking at that gone world with rose-tinted glasses, I'd suggest instead using rose tinted welding goggles..

The world of today may be full of flaws, but the avenues for breaking away from controlled narratives and controlled economic rules are probably broader than they've ever been.

Family Guy Nasty Wolf Pack

https://youtu.be/5oW9mNbMbmY

The perfect wish to outsmart a genie | Chris & Jack

https://youtu.be/lM0teS7PFMo

Let me paint a purpose for you which could take millions of years. How about building a Atomic Force microscope equivalent which can probe Calabi Yau manifolds to send messages to other multiverses.

I mean, not only human-generated text. Also, human brains are arguably statistical models trained on human-generated/collected data as well...

He can only be referring to these Jira tickets I need to write.

I'd say no, human brains are "trained" on billions of years of sensory data. A very small amount of that is human-generated.

1% of the labour force works in agriculture:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-...

1%

let that number sink in; think about it really means.

And what it means is that at least basic food (unprocessed, no meat) could be completely free. It make take some smart logistics, but it's doable. All of our food is already one step, one small step, away from becoming free for everyone.

This applies to clothes and basic tools as well.

I know! It's totally and completely immoral to give the little guy rights against the powerful. It infringes in the privileges and advantages of the powerful. It is the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks of the world who should capture all the economic value available. Everyone else must be content to be paid in exposure for their creativity.

Then when word processors came around, it was expected that faculty members will type it up themselves.

I don't know if there were fewer secretaries as a result, but professors' lives got much worse.

He misses the old days.

That of course isn't stopping us from marching forwards though in the name of progress.

In all the cases of killing, the robots were innocent. It was either a human that tricked the robot or didn't tell the robot what they were doing.

For example, a lady killed her husband by asking a robot to detach his arm and give it to here. Once she got it, she beat the husband to death and the robot didn't have the capability to stop her (since it gave her it's arm). That caused the robot to effectively self-destruct.

Giskard, I believe, was the only one that killed people. He ultimately ended up self-destructing as a result (the fate of robots that violate the laws).

My point in bringing up that metaphor is to focus the analogy: When people say "we're just statistical models trained on sensory data", we tend to focus way too much on the "sensory data" part, which has led to for example AI manufacturers investing billions of dollars into slurping up as much human intellectual output as possible to train "smarter" models.

The focus on the sensory input inherently devalues our quality of being; that who we are is predominately explicable by the world around us.

However: We should be focusing on the "statistical model" part: that even if it is accurate to holistically describe the human brain as a statistical model trained on sensory data (which I have doubts about, but those are fine to leave to the side): its very clear that the fundamental statistical model itself is simply so far superior in human brains that comparing it to an LLM is like comparing us to a dog.

It should also be a focal point for AI manufacturers and researchers. If you are on the hunt for something along the spectrum of human level intelligence, and during this hunt you are providing it ten thousand lifetimes of sensory data, to produce something that, maybe, if you ask it right, it can behave similarity to a human who has trained in the domain in only years: You're barking up the wrong tree. What you're producing isn't even on the same spectrum; that doesn't mean it isn't useful, but its not human-like intelligence.

No. The Star Trek computer is a fictional character, really. It's not a technology any more than Jean-Luc Picard is. It's does whatever the writers needed it to do to further the plot.

It reminds me: J. Michael Straczynski (of Babylon 5 fame) was once asked "How fast do Starfuries travel?" and he replied "At the speed of plot."

>As I recall, many of his early stories involved "U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men" which was a huge conglomerate owning a lot of the market on AI...

>May want to reread. U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men is pretty prominent in his Robot stories.

Good points from some of these replies. The interview is fairly brief, perhaps he didn't feel he had the time to touch on the socio-economic issues, or that it wasn't the proper forum for those concerns.

LLMs have access to what we generate, but not the source. So it embed how we may use words, but not why we use this word and not others.

That's humanity. We're tool users above anything else. This gets lost.

I don't understand this point - we can obviously collect sensory data and use that for training. Many AI/LLM/robotics projects do this today...

> So it embed how we may use words, but not why we use this word and not others.

Humans learn language by observing other humans use language, not by being taught explicit rules about when to use which word and why.

Did he though? Or was the Butlerian Jihad backstory whose function was allow him to believably center human characters in his stories, given sci-fi expectations of the time?

I like Herbert's work, but ultimately he (and Asimov) were producers of stories to entertain people, so entertainment always would take priority over truth (and then there's the entirely different problem of accurately predicting the future).

Here's my broad concern: On the one hand, we have an AI thought leader (Sam Altman) who defines super-intelligence as surpassing human intelligence at all measurable tasks. I don't believe it is controversial to say that we've established that the goal of LLM intelligence is something along these lines: it exists on the spectrum of human intelligence, its trained on human intelligence, and we want it to surpass human intelligence, on that spectrum.

On the other hand: we don't know how the statistical model of human intelligence works, at any level at all which would enable reproduction or comparison, and there's really good reason to believe that the human intelligence statistical model is vastly superior to the LLM model. The argument for this lies in my previous comment: the vast majority of contribution of intelligence advances in LLM intelligence comes from increasing the volume of training data. Some intelligence likely comes from statistical modeling breakthroughs since the transformer, but by and large its from training data. On the other hand: Comparatively speaking, the most intelligent humans are not more intelligent because they've been alive for longer and thus had access to more sensory data. Some minor level of intelligence comes from the quality of your sensory data (studying, reading, education). But the vast majority of intelligence difference between humans is inexplicable; Einstein was just Born Smarter; God granted him a unique and better statistical model.

This points to the undeniable reality that, at the very least, the statistical model of the human brain and that of an LLM is very different, which should cause you to raise eyebrows at Sam Altman's statement that superintelligence will evolve along the spectrum of human intelligence. It might, but its like arguing that the app you're building is going to be the highest quality and fastest MacOS app ever built, and you're building it using WPF and compiling it for x86 to run on WINE and Rosetta. GPT isn't human intelligence; at best, it might be emulating, extremely poorly and inefficiently, some parts of human intelligence. But, they didn't get the statistical model right, and without that its like forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Why not? Who is this technology expert with flawless predictions? Talking about the future is inherently an exercise of the imagination, which is also what fiction writing is.

And nothing he's saying here contradicts our observations of AI up to this point. AI artwork has gotten good at copying the styles of humans, but it hasn't created any new styles that are at all compelling. So leave that to the humans. The same with writing; AI does a good job at mimicking existing writing styles, but has yet to demonstrate the ability to write anything that dazzles us with its originality. So his prediction is exactly right: AI does work that is really an insult to the complex human brain.

Sensory data is not the main issue, but how we interpret them.

In Jacob Bronowski's The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, IIRC, there's an argument that our eyes are very coarse sensors. Instead they do basic analysis from which the brain can infer the real world around us with other data from other organs. Like Plato's cave, but with much more dimensions.

But we humans came with the same mechanisms that roughly interpret things the same way. So there's some commonality there about the final interpretation.

> Humans learn language by observing other humans use language, not by being taught explicit rules about when to use which word and why.

Words are symbols that refers to things and the relations between them. In the same book, there's a rough explanation for language which describe the three elements that define it: Symbols or terms, the grammar (or the rules for using the symbols), and a dictionary which maps the symbols to things and the rules to interactions in another domain that we already accept as truth.

Maybe we are not taught the rules explicitly, but there's a lot of training done with corrections when we say a sentence incorrectly. We also learn the symbols and the dictionary as we grow and explore.

So LLMs learn the symbols and the rules, but not the whole dictionary. It can use the rules to create correct sentences, and relates some symbols to other, but ultimately there's no dictionary behind it.

Because we can't compare human and LLM architectural substrates, LLMs will never surpass human-level performance on _all_ tasks that require applying intelligence?

If my summary is correct, then is there any hypothetical replacement for LLM (for example, LLM+robotics, LLMs with CoT, multi-modal LLMs, multi-modal generative AI systems, etc) which would cause you to then consider this argument invalid (i.e. for the replacement, it could, sometime replace humans for all tasks)?

It's been quite a while since anyone in the developed world has had to wash clothes by slapping them against a rock while standing in a river.

Obviously this is really wishing for domestic robots, not AI, and robots are at least a couple of levels of complexity beyond today's text/image/video GenAI.

There were already huge issues with corporatisation of creativity as "content" long before AI arrived. In fact one of our biggest problems is the complete collapse of the public's ability to imagine anything at all outside of corporate content channels.

AI can reinforce that. But - ironically - it can also be very good at subverting it.

The reason we give them awards is that the camera can't tell you which lens will give you the effect you want or how to emphasize certain emotions with light.

and MCP can work with deepseek running locally. hmm...

The question I have is why AI technology is being so aggressively advertised nowadays, and why none of it seems to be liberating in any way.

Once the plow liberated humans from some kinds of work. Some time later it was just a tool that slaves, very non liberated, used to tend to rich people's farms.

Technology is tricky. I don't trust who is developing AI to be liberating.

The article also plays on the "favorite author" thing. It knows many young folk see Asimov as a role model, so it is leveraging that emotional connection to gather conversation around a topic that is not what it seems to be. I consider it a dirty trick. It is disgraceful given the current world situation (AI being used for war, surveillance, brainwashing).

We are better than this.

I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain and the reason why they vote the way they do. Modern society has left them behind, abandoned them, and not given them any way to keep up with the rest of the US. Now they're getting taken advantage of by the wealthy like Trump, Murdoch, Musk, etc. who use their unhappiness to rage against the machine.

> My money is that rural towns USA will look almost identical in 30 years from now.

You mean poor, uneducated and without any real prospects of anything like a career? Pretty much. Except there will be far more people who are impoverished and with no hope for the future. I don't see any of this as a good thing.

Maybe some day I will, but I find it hard to believe it, given a LLM just copies its training material. All the creativity comes from the human input, but even though people can now cheaply copy the style of actual artists, that doesn't mean they can make it work.

Art is interesting because it is created by humans, not despite it. For example, poetry is interesting because it makes you think about what did the author mean. With LLMs there is no author, which makes those generated poems garbage.

I'm not saying that it can't work at all, it can, but not in the way people think. I subscribe to George Orwell's dystopian view from 1984 who already imagined the "versificator".

There are 2 types of grammar for natural language - descriptive (how the language actually works and is used) and prescriptive (a set of rule about how a language should be used). There is no known complete and consistent rule-based grammar for any natural human language - all of these grammar are based on some person or people, in a particular period of time, selecting a subset of the real descriptive grammar of the language and saying 'this is the better way'. Prescriptive, rule-based grammar is not at all how humans learn their first language, nor is prescriptive grammar generally complete or consistent. Babies can easily learn any language, even ones that do not have any prescriptive grammar rules, just by observing - there have been many studies that confirm this.

> there's a lot of training done with corrections when we say a sentence incorrectly.

There's a lot of the same training for LLMs.

> So LLMs learn the symbols and the rules, but not the whole dictionary. It can use the rules to create correct sentences, and relates some symbols to other, but ultimately there's no dictionary behind it.

LLMs definitely learn 'the dictionary' (more accurately a set of relations/associations between words and other types of data) and much better than humans do, not that such a 'dictionary' is an actual determined part of the human brain.

Oh, come on. Who can't love the "classic" song, I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again[0]?

I mean, that's AI "creativity," at its peak!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPlOYPGMRws (Probably NSFW)

LLM luddites often call LLMs stochastic parrots or advanced text prediction engines. They're right, in my view, and I feel that LLM evangelists often don't understand why. Because LLMs have a vastly different statistical model, even when they showcase signs of human-like intelligence, what we're seeing cannot possibly be human-like intelligence, because human intelligence is inseparable from its statistical model.

But, it might still be intelligence. It might still be economically productive and useful and cool. It might also be scarier than most give it credit for being; we're building something that clearly has some kind of intelligence, crudely forcing a mask of human skin over it, oblivious to what's underneath.

I'm not sure I've actually seen an advertisement for AI. It's being endlessly discussed though on HN and other places, probably because it's at an interesting point at the moment making rapid progress. And also shoved into a lot of products and services of course.

Things that were common in that era that are rare today:

1. Living in shared accomodation. It was common then for people to live in boarding houses and bedsits as adults. Today these are largely extinct. Generally, the living space per person has increased substantially at every level of wealth. Only students live in this sort of environment today and even then it is usually a flat (ie. sharing with people you know on an equal basis) not a bedsit/boarding house (ie. living in someone's house according to her rules--no ladies in gentlemen's bedrooms, no noise after 8pm, etc.).

2. Second-hand clothes and repairing clothes. Most people wear new clothes. People buy second hand because it is trendy. Nobody really repairs anything because that is all they can afford. People just buy new. Nobody darns socks or puts elbow patches on jackets where they have worn out. Only people that buy expensive shoes get their shoes resoled. Normal people just buy cheap shoes more often and they really do save money doing this.

Today the woman that would have been a typist has a different job, and a more productive one that pays more.

Automation won't obsolete work and workers it will make us more productive and our desires will increase. We will all expect what today are considered luxuries only the rich can afford. We will all have custom software written for our needs. We will all have individual legal advice on any topic we need advice on. We will all have bigger houses with more stuff in them, better finishings, triple glazed windows, and on and on.

Focus on what matters for humans.

I know I could google it, but I wonder washing machines originally was called an “automatic clothes washer” or something similar before it became widely adopted.

A friend demoed Suno to me, a couple of days ago, and it did generate lyrics (but not NSFW ones).

And often they get caught up supporting the latest fake AI craze that they dont get to research AGI.

Asimov was mostly not a fantasy writer. He was a science writer and professor of biochemistry. He published over 500 books. I didn't feel like counting but half or more of them are about science. Maybe 20% are science fiction and fantasy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov_bibliography_(cat...

I don't buy it. I think our eyes are approximately as fine as we perceive them to be.

When you look through a pair of binoculars at a boat and some trees on the other side of a lake, the only organ that's getting a magnified view is the eyes, so any information you derive comes from the eyes and your imagination, it can't have been secretly inferred from other senses.

>A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm

Therefore a robot could allow some humans to die, if the 0th law took precedence.

IIRC, none of the robots broke the laws of robotics, rather they ostensibly broke the laws but the robots were later investigated to have been following them because of some quirk.

"MCP is highly intelligent and yet ruthless. It apparently wants to get rid of humans and especially users."

https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Master_Control_Program

Let's see an example:

Ask if america was ever a democracy and tell us what it uses as sources to evaluate its ability to function. Language really shows its true colors when you commit to floating signifiers.

I asked gemini "was america ever a democracy"? And it confidently responded "While the ideal of democracy has always been a guiding principle in the United States", which is a blatant lie, and provided no sources. The next prompt, "was america every a democracy? Please cite sources" gives a mealy-mouthed reply hedging on the definition of democracy... which it refuses to cite. If I ask it "will america ever be democratic" it just vomits up excuses about democracy being a principal and not measurable. With no sources. Etc. this is not a useful tool for things humans already do well. This is a PR megaphone with little utility outside of shitty copy editing.

No reason to think an LLM (a few generations down the line if not now) cannot do that

This really seems like an "akshually" argument to me...

Nobody is denying that there are dishwashers and washing machines, and that they are big time savers. But is it really a wonder what people are referring to when they say "I want AI to wash my dishes and do my laundry"? That is, I still spend hours doing the dishes and laundry every week, and I have a dishwasher and washing machine. But I still want something to fold my laundry, something that lets me just dump my dishes in the sink and have them come out clean, ideally put away in the cabinets.

> Obviously this is really wishing for domestic robots, not AI

I don't mean this to be an "every Internet argument is over semantics" example, but literally every company and team I know that's working on autonomous robots refers heavily to them as AI. And there is a fundamental difference between "old school" robotics, i.e robots following procedural instructions, and robots that use AI-based models, e.g https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gemini-robotics-brings... . I think it's doubly weird that you say that today's washing machines "has at least some very basic AI in it" (I think "very basic" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there...), but don't think AI refers to autonomous robots.

I see this referenced over and over again to trivialise AI as if it is a fait acompli.

I'm not entirely sure why invoking statistics feels like a rebuttal to me. Putting aside the fact that LLMs are not purely statistics, even if they were what proof is there that you cannot make a statistical intelligent machine. It would not at all surprise me to learn that someone has made a purely statistical Turing complete model. To then argue that it couldn't think you are saying computers can never think, and by that and the fact that we think you are invoking a soul, God, or Penrose.

Somehow I doubt that the reason gen AI is way ahead of laundry-folding robots is because it's some kind of big secret about how to fold a shirt, or there aren't enough examples of shirt folding.

Manipulating a physical object like a shirt (especially a shirt or other piece of cloth, as opposed to a rigid object) is orders of magnitude more complex that completing a text string.

But that's more a knock on people like Marc Andreessen than a reason you should put stock in Asimov.

It was assumed that if you asked the same AI the same question, you'd get the same answer every time. But that's not how LLMs work (I know you can see them the same every time and get the same output but at we don't do that so how we experience them is different).

And we can distort quite far (see cartoons in drawing, dubstep in music,...)

Well sure, there’s also a computer recording, storing, and manipulating the songs I record and the books I write. But that’s not what we mean by “AI that composes music and writes books.”

This isn’t a quibble about the term “AI.” It’s simply clear from context that we’re talking about full automation of these tasks initiated by nothing more than a short prompt from the human.

(This should already be clear given that robots do exist, and we do call them robots, as you yourself noted, but never mind that for now.)

It’s not even about the level of mechanical or computational complexity. Automobiles have a lot of mechanical and computational complexity, but also aren’t called robots (ignoring of course self-driving cars).

My point is just that the availability of training data is vastly different between these cases. If we want better AI we're probably going to have to generate some huge curated datasets for mundane things that we've never considered worth capturing before.

It's an unfortunate quirk of what we decide to share with each other that has positioned AI to do art and not laundry.

Something about his worldview always seemed off to me, although I didn't know he actually seriously held such utopian convictions about AI. It explains an awful lot of the way his stories are.

Compare that to the parodies made by someone like "Weird Al" Yankovic. And I get that these tools will get better, but the best parodies work due to the human performer. They are funny because they aren't fake.

This goes for other art forms. People mention photography a lot, comparing it with painting. Photography works because it captures a real moment in time and space; it works because it's not fake. Painting also works because it shows what human imagination and skill with brushes can do. When it's fake (e.g., not made by a human painting with brushes on canvas, but by a Photoshop filter), it's meaningless.

The vast majority of the gains in productivity have been captured and funneled upward.

0 - https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcX...

Yeah, I'd say characterisation is a weakness of his. I've read Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, and Double Star. Heinlein does explore characters more than, say, Clark, but he doesn't go much for internal change or emotional growth. His male characters typically fall into one of two cartoonish camps: either supremely confident, talented, intelligent and independent (e.g. Jubal, Bernardo, Mannie, Bonforte...) or vaguely pathetic and stupid (e.g. moon men). His female characters are submissive, clumsily sexualised objects who contribute very little to the plot. There are a few partial exceptions - e.g. Lorenzo in Double Star and female pilots in Starship Troopers - but the general atmosphere is one of teenage boy wish fulfilment.

lol no, what it has it's a finite state machine, you don't want undefined or new behaviour in user appliances

I don't mean to sound insensitive, but, how? Literal hours?

Banks' Culture Communism/Anarchism > Star Trek, any day imho.

Generally, it has to automate a task with some intelligence, so dishwashers qualify. It isn't a existence proof (nor did I state that).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648786

- basic features (color, brightness and contrast, edges and shapes, motion and direction)

- depth and spatial relationships

- recognition

- location and movement

- focus and attention

- prediction and filling in gaps

“Seeing” real world requires much more than simply seeing with one eye.

The third option is that the oligarchy fully internalizes its pursuit of ruthless concentration of power. But in that case, someone will probably create an AI that's better at playing the power game, and at that point, it's over for the oligarchs.

Generally, I also agree that Heinlein's characters are one dimensional and could benefit from greater character growth, though that was a bit of a hallmark of Golden Age sci-fi.

Oh boy, how foolish we've been!

It's not a pure AI output - I generated a bunch of lyrics in text (which doesn't use credits), selected the best one (obviously), padded them out with some repetition, entered a style, generated the audio a few times, selected my favourite audio, and edited the audio (poorly) by repeating a few bars of the intro to make it longer. You don't see the times it generated lyrics about X.509 certificates (even though the prompt was for them to be a valid X.509 certificate) or the times the vocals were unintelligible.

Here's another good version of the song with a different style: https://suno.com/song/2775f188-7582-4970-ac71-5a3b82e39a04?s...

Here's are two versions that are disqualified because you can't make out the lyrics: https://suno.com/song/9cebb5b3-c336-495e-be3d-195ea338eb52?s... https://suno.com/song/c6f0e666-ce91-4494-a8b5-1232862965c1?s...

---

I think generative AI does work as a toy. You can ask for all sorts of insane nonsense and laugh at what the program spits out to fulfil your request. I was a paying customer of AI Dungeon 2 (before the incident where OpenAI and/or the Mormons broke it in a poor attempt to impose safety rules).

I didn't keep any lyrics failures, but at the time, I was playing around with requesting songs that were also valid computer files, so here's one that went well: a "religious folk song that is also a valid Cisco configuration file", with the style changed to trance after the lyrics were generated: https://suno.com/song/32aa6d33-0f9f-4d3b-ad53-46a5fe238916?s... and another: https://suno.com/song/32aa6d33-0f9f-4d3b-ad53-46a5fe238916?s...

Juniper doesn't work as well because of the punctuation - it can generate lyrics with braced blocks, but they don't sound like anything: https://suno.com/song/32a0d70c-c9c9-468e-8905-67669c6b90d4?s...

Here's "a religious folk song that is also a valid COBOL program, without any English words": https://suno.com/song/b75aae68-9c1e-46e5-94d4-8bc63387640e?s...

Here are some that aren't configuration files but just sound cool. Prompt was something like "Write a song about a technological dystopia where everyone can only speak BGP." https://suno.com/song/1866516b-e133-47a5-a0ac-23ccb36f81ab?s... . This one's probably a song about "network protocols and their pros and cons": https://suno.com/song/23584394-7058-4bc1-8187-b3d286d36ec4?s...

And while I'm looking at my Suno outputs list, the reason I ever bothered to use it was to see if it could render these lyrics as a ripoff of "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka (it cannot because it only makes actual music): https://suno.com/song/19d1a90d-9ed6-4087-94e5-89e41363726e?s...

(I'm assuming that you can open these pages just by having the links. Some of them are set to public visibility.)

There is much worthy of critique in Heinlein, especially in his depiction of women. I've spent about a quarter century off and on both reading and formulating such critiques, much more recently than I've spent meaningful time with his fiction. I've also read what he had to say for himself before he died, and what Mrs. Heinlein - she kept the name - said about him after. If we want to talk about, for example, how the themes of maternal incest and specifically feminine embodiment of weakly superhuman AGI in his later work reflect a degree of senescence and the wish for a supercompetent maternal figure to whom to surrender the burden of responsibility, or if we want to talk about how Heinlein seems to spend an enormous amount of time just generally exploring stuff from female characters' perspectives that an honest modern inquiry would recognize as fumbling badly but earnestly in the direction of something like a contemporary understanding of gender, then we could talk about that.

No one wants to, though. You can't use anything like that as a stick to beat people with, so it never gets a look in, and those as here who care nothing for anything of the subject save if it looks serviceable as a weapon claim to be the only ones in the talk who are honest. They don't know the man's work well enough to talk about the years he spent selling stories that absolutely revolve around character development, which exist solely to exemplify it! Of course these are universally dismissed as his 'juveniles' - a few letters shy of 'juvenilia' - because science fiction superfans are all children and so are science fiction superhaters, neither of whom knows how to respond in any way better than a tantrum on the rare occasion of being told bluntly it's well past time they grew up.

But they're the honest ones. Why not? So it goes. It's a conversation I know better than to try to have, especially on Hacker News; if I don't care for how it's proceeding, I've no one but myself to blame.

My point is simply that we absolutely do not refer to a home dishwasher as a robot. Nor an old thermostat with a bimetallic strip and a mercury switch. Nor even a normal home PC.

In entire fairness, I was distracted by you having said he and his contemporaries must all have been autistic, as if either you yourself were remotely competent to embark upon any such determination, or as though it would in some way indict their work if they were.

I'm sure you would never in a million years dare utter "the R-slur" in public, though I would guess that in private the violation of taboo is thrilling. That's fine as far as it goes, but you really should not expect to get away with pretending you can just say "autistic" to mean the same thing and have no one notice, you blatantly obvious bigot.

If you meant that honestly, you would already have found ample directions for further research, easily enough not to need asking. Everything you claim to want lies just a Google search away, on any of the various and I should hope fairly easily identifiable search terms I have mentioned. "It is not my job to educate you."

Or, rather, it would still not be my job even if to learn were what you really want here. You don't, of course. That's why you haven't bothered so much as trying a few searches that might turn up something you would have to pretend to have read. Much easier to try to make me look emotionally unstable - 'defy?' Really. - because you can't actually answer anything I've said and you know it. Good luck with that, too.

We've clearly got off on the wrong foot here. I don't want to make out like I think Heinlein is crap. He had a lot of fantastic, creative ideas about science, technology, culture, sexuality and governance. He was extremely daring and sometimes quite subtle in the way he explored those ideas. But - in the novels I've read - his characters lack a certain depth and relatability. They express very little of the self-doubt, empathy, growth, and deep-seated motivations that are core to the human condition. So it goes also with Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, and others. And it's fine that those weren't their strong suits. They had other strengths. And there were other writers like Bester, Dick, Le Guin, Zelazny, Herbert etc... who could fill the gaps.

Don't expect me to stop discussing what your behavior displays of your character, just because you've finally shown the modicum of rhetorical sense or tactical cunning required to minimally amend that behavior. Again, if you actually meant even a fraction of what you say, you would now be reading instead of still speaking. If it bothers you that you continue to indict yourself by your actions this way, consider acting differently.

Should you at any future point opt to develop a thesis in this area which is capable of supporting knowledgeable discussion, I confide it will find an audience in accord with its quality. In the meantime, please stop inviting me to participate in the project of recovering your totally unforced embarrassment.

Believe it or not by the look of things, I already have enough else to do today. Wiping your nose as you struggle and fail to learn from your vastly overprivileged young life's first encounter with entirely merited and obviously unmitigated contempt doesn't really make the list, at least not past the point at which it ceases to amuse, which I admit is now fast approaching.

Ah, here we go. I understand why you're using a fresh throwaway for this sort of thing, of course. Can't risk being seen for no better than you have to be, eh? But this at least - and, I strongly suspect, at last - is honest.

You can't abuse me in any way you're wise or sensible enough to imagine finding, so now you'll go mistreat someone inside the span of your arm's reach, blaming me all the while for your own infantile urge to do so. I wish you every bit as much joy of it as you deserve. And I hope they know your current Hacker News handle.

If you didn't want to prove me right when I said six hours ago [1] that you were throwing a tantrum, why continue throwing the tantrum?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655066

I don't know how much further you expect me to need to boil down "read more" and still be able to take you seriously. How do you expect that, when you haven't even bothered trying to justify how you chose those four novels to represent forty years?

I see that 'seriously' very much describes how you like to regard yourself. You've insisted most thoroughly others must regard you likewise, regardless of what you show yourself anywhere near capable of actually rewarding or indeed even appreciating. Do you have a favorable impression of your efforts thus far? Have they had the results that you hoped?

We would now be having a different conversation if you had said anything to suggest to me it would be worth my trouble to continue in the attempt. I'd have enjoyed that conversation, I think; as most days here, I had hopes of learning something new. You've felt the need to spend the day doing this instead. If you don't like how that's working out, whom fairly may you blame?

Every substantive point I've actually made all day you have totally ignored, and this is what it's worth your time still to do. But sure. You can stop paying me rent to live in your head any time you like. Keep telling yourself that. I don't doubt you need to, to get through a day.

Also, 122d40d7236cd3ade496d0101d8029ec.

That's not even slightly to your credit, of course. But I can't fairly say you weren't involved, and I have to admit I genuinely appreciate this result, however inadvertent and I'm sure unimaginable on your part it may be. So, though I say it through gritted teeth, thank you for your time. If for absolutely nothing else whatsoever, for that at least I must express my genuine gratitude.

Intolerable though you've been throughout, and despite what I assume to have been your every intention, something good may yet come of your ill efforts. You deserve to know that. May it heap as many coals of fire on your head as your heart should prove small enough to deserve.

We could have done that fifteen hours ago [1], or eleven hours ago [2], or nine hours ago [3] [4], or any time you wanted. You haven't. What's changed?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655066

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657766

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43659136

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43659187

No, you don't. I've said nothing I need defend, and you've said nothing you can. It would be one thing if I had to say not to piss on my boots and tell me it's raining, but this doesn't even count as pissing. It's just you repeating yourself from yesterday and that's boring for both of us.

"You are a bigot" is a factual claim I have made [1], now quite a number of hours and comments ago. You haven't addressed it. You won't. You can't. You have no choice now but to let it stand. You have shown it more true than even you yourself can pretend to ignore. You need someone to tell you it isn't really true, in a way you can believe. No one is here to tell you that.

There are other embarrassments, of course; you've shown yourself not a tenth the scholar you fancy yourself to be, nor able to handle yourself even slightly in the face of someone who needs nothing from you and cares neither for nor against you. You would care more that I called you an abuser, but you don't see the people you try to treat that way as human. So what you're really stuck on is that I called you a bigot and you can't answer back. Hence still finding it worth your while to try to talk me into letting you off that hook.

Sorry, not sorry. Go back to bed. Read a book while you're there, why don't you? It might help you sleep.

edit: You also haven't explained what makes those four books you named as exemplary as you called them. Can you describe the common thread? I ask because I actually have read them, in no case fewer than three times, and they really haven't all that much in common. Oh, by the same author, certainly. But you've only dropped names. You haven't tried to draw any comparisons or demonstrate anything by the rhetorical juxtaposition of those characters, though I grant you keep insisting it must count for something that you listed them. You haven't, so far as I can see, discussed or even mentioned a single event in the plot of any of those novels. For all the nothing you've had to say with any actual reference to them, even the few texts you named might as well not exist!

It is extremely risible at this time of you to try to claim you are the one here interested in talking about Heinlein. If there were a God, it would not be safe to tell a lie of that magnitude near a church. But no matter. To get back to the first question I asked here just above: Did anyone actually explain to you why those four should be the first and last of Heinlein worth talking about? Did you ever think to ask? Or was it that they were part of an assignment? - you turned in a paper and assumed the passing grade meant you must have learned something by the transaction, and that for you was where the matter and all semblance of curiosity ended.

I hope it isn't that last one. I already believed firmly that student loan relief was the correct action both ethically and economically; as I have said in other quarters lately, it is not possible for you to be enough of an asshole to change my politics. But if this is you recapitulating something you paid to be taught - if you're currently pursuing or God forfend have completed an American university education, and the best approximation of clear thought you can manage is this - then whoever sold you and your family that bill of goods ought damn well be horsewhipped, and that they merely see the loan annulled instead would be a considerable mercy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657766

> His male characters typically fall into one of two cartoonish camps: either supremely confident, talented, intelligent and independent (e.g. Jubal, Bernardo, Mannie, Bonforte...) or vaguely pathetic and stupid (e.g. moon men). His female characters are submissive, clumsily sexualised objects who contribute very little to the plot. There are a few partial exceptions - e.g. Lorenzo in Double Star and female pilots in Starship Troopers - but the general atmosphere is one of teenage boy wish fulfilment.

"Cartoonish." "Pathetic." "Stupid." "Submissive." "Clumsily sexualized." "Teenage boy." 'Moon men' - you mean Loonies? And this all was you yesterday [1]. How far do you really expect to get with this farcical pantomime of sweet reason now? I ask again: What's changed?

This all began when I said you obviously hadn't read what you claimed to have [2], and it got so far up your nose you couldn't help going and proving me right. You've made a lot more bad decisions since then, but don't worry: I'll keep reminding you as long as you show you need me to that you can amend your behavior at any time.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43651479

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649293

First, assuming you are not in fact a public figure, I will not publicly reveal your identity or any information I believe could lead to its disclosure, and that is exactly as far into my confidence as you may expect to come. That caveat excepted, I hereby explicitly disclaim any presumption you may have of privacy in any communication you make with me via email or other nonpublic means.

I won't dox you. I understand it isn't as safe for everyone as for me to have their name in the world. And I'm not saying I intend to publish all, or indeed any, of what you send; if it deserves in my view to remain in confidence, I will keep it so. But if you think taking this conversation to email will give you a chance to play games where no one else can see, you had better think twice.

(Should you by any of several plausible means dig up my phone number and try giving me a call, I hereby explicitly advise that any such action on your part constitutes "prior consent" per Md. Code §10–402 [1], and I will exercise my option under that law without further notice.)

Second, there exists an organization with which I have a legal agreement, binding on all our various heirs and assigns, to the effect we are quits forever. I will refer to this company as "Name Redacted for Legal Reasons" or "Name Redacted" for short, and describe it as the brainchild of a fascinating and tight-knit group of siblings, any of the three (technically four) of whom I'd have liked the chance to know better than I did.

I will also note, not for the first time, that I signed that agreement in entire good faith which has endured from that day through this, and I earnestly believe the same of my counterparty both collectively, and in the individual and separate persons of those who represented Name Redacted to me throughout that process as well as through my prior period of employment.

Now, if I were an employee of Name Redacted for Legal Reasons, and I had started a day's worth of shit in public with a signatory of such an agreement as I describe - that is, if I had acted in a way which could be construed to compromise my employer's painstakingly arrived-upon mutual quitclaim - then the very last thing I would ever want to do would be to allow to come into existence documentary evidence of my possibly somewhat innocent but certainly very grave foolishness. Because if that did happen, I would understand I R. May confidently expect very soon to become 'the most fired-for-causedest person in the history of fuck.'

As I said, I signed in good faith. In that same good faith, what choice really would I have but to privately disclose in full detail? It would be irresponsible of me to assume this was the only problem such intemperate behavior might be creating for Name Redacted, any or all of which might be far more consequential than this.

I'm sure at this point I'm only talking to hear myself speak, though. In any case, I look forward to your email.

[1] https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Laws/StatuteText?arti...

> Is that all? You mistake your opinions for facts, and when motivated you freely ignore the difference between an author's voice and that of a viewpoint character. This you share with millions, and feel the need to be secretive about? I thought you had something serious to talk about. Go away.