Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

by Hugh Howey

The futurist and the vagabond are the same souls—one in body and the other in thought.

The truth was this: History remembers the first, and only the first. These are the creeping and eternal glaciers, the names etched across all time like scars in granite cliffs. Those who came after were the inch or two of snowdrift that would melt in due time. They would trickle, forgotten, into the pores of the earth, be swallowed, and melt snow at the feet of other forgotten men.

It was hard to know what drove you once you passed the thresholds of all pain.

Success in art lies as much in the changing tastes of the crowd as in the offerings. There is a varied froth of material being generated at all times, much of it along narrow themes, and when the need from the audience becomes great enough, one stream of that art is rewarded.

Maybe we should give less credit to those we think broke new ground. And maybe we should look harder and appreciate more those who came before us.

There is a wastefulness to humankind that we ignore when we assume it’s a contemporary and temporary problem. Instead of worshipping a past that never happened, we should look to a future that we might avoid.

The parts of our brains wired for kids were long ago appropriated by dogs and cats to win them scraps. How long before our machines prey on the same weaknesses? When will we see an app telling owners which restaurants are robot-friendly? Isn’t it funny that we call the acquisition of new technology “adopting”?

“What’s the first thing AI will do when it becomes self-aware?” he asked me. “What?” I wanted to know. “Hide,” Kevin said. “The first thing it’ll do is hide.”