Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

by Hugh Howey

That’s Hugh, the kindest, most joyful contrarian you’ll ever meet.

These stories feel like going back to your childhood home and discovering there are secret rooms you’ve never explored.

Hours and hours of horizons and daydreams. Night shifts with stars so bright, you could read by them. Flat seas that reflected these pinpricks until I was surrounded by stars, floating in deep space.

I’m halfway through my voyage, and what seemed unlikely in the whole has been slowly achieved one horizon at a time.

Is it possible to doubt where we might go, seeing how far we’ve come? We do the impossible daily. We are creeping ever toward that unreachable horizon. I wonder what we’ll find when we get there.

Frozen to death by altitude or by time was all the same. The truth was this: History remembers the first, and only the first.

this wasteland of a frozen ball, out here in a corner of the galaxy where men go either to not be found or to be remembered for all time,

We had radios in our parkas but rarely used them. Good tent mates had little need for words. Roped in to one another, the union becomes symbiotic. You match paces, one staring at a flash-lit patch of bright snow, the other staring at a man’s back, illuminating a spot in a sea of darkness.

True even for backpack hiking, petsonal experience has taught me.

And so mountains brought couples together like retirement homes. You look around, and what you have left is what you bed down with.

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

Beneath that star who alone would ever know the awful truth of my most hollow glory.

5* Fantastic story. What an adventure it puts your mind on!

Around the same time, I read Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants. Kevin helps dispel the illusion of singular creators, discoverers, and inventors. What is true of the sciences I believe is also true of art. 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.

It’s not coincidence; it’s shared experience.

With “The Walk up Nameless Ridge,” I wanted to write about the possibility that our true explorers will never be known. 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.

You settle in the skin of an alien race, and by the time you feel at home there, they are no more.

Sector 1’s written language is nothing like Sector 2’s. If you planted a bomb in Sector 2’s language and scattered the remains on a terminal screen, you would have Sector 1’s language. It’s no wonder this planet is always at war.

Lol

No two people have ever battled that read each other’s poetry,

And hell has come for us at last.

4* Interesting, enjoyed the story. Fell like the vague answers both work amd dont. Left with some questions.

It’s difficult to remember that every conflict has two sides. The other side feels just as secure in their position as we do in ours.

There’s something to be gained by taking the opposing side as our own, really trying to empathize, imagine the bad guys are the good guys. With their motivations in mind, it becomes more difficult to dehumanize them and easier to understand them. It’s not something that comes easily—but I’m trying.

“Nothing goes to waste.”

4* Damn. Good morbid satire.

But this is where science fiction and satire help reveal absurdities in real life. We harm ourselves all the time in pursuit of strange ideals.

The irony is in the title. Plenty goes to waste. All for sport and art and shame.

It was a shifter, which seemed a hard way to start driving, but Pa believed in learning the worst to begin with.

Ha, my dad bought me a really cheap (1.4k) manual for my first car and made me drive that the first time i drove to learn.i Made automatic cars hard to drive at first when the first car i bought was an automatic.i Stil appreciate this tho. I can drive any car when unexpected situations happen. Very handy skill.

And you didn’t need to know where to look no more to see that something bad was coming.

5* Great short! would love to explore further off it

But the impending government shutdown of 2013 was occupying my mind, the absolute lunacy that Congress could watch disaster slowly unfold without taking action.

The easiest way to vanquish us and settle on Earth would be to arrive a few decades (or centuries) behind some guided meteors. Or unleash a devastating virus. Instead, aliens manage to traverse the cosmos and then are usually portrayed as naked, slobbering fools. They are more ghost story than science fiction.

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.

A politician with his speech. Smiles on all the bearded faces. Tools held ceremoniously. With someone else’s sweat in them.

They tore up what they laid down, and then laid it down again. But lives are only laid down once.

You call your media social, but you look like robots to me.

And all comes crashing toward the cold Earth.

3.5* I liked the premise of the story, but didnt get super pulled into it.

Each time, I would cringe to hear about all that Jefferson did and built. All the orchards he planted. The grapes he grew. The land he cultivated. I couldn’t help but imagine him on the porch with a book that he probably didn’t pay for, sipping an iced tea, while the brother of someone he was both having sex with and legally owned was pausing in his toil to wipe his brow and gaze up at the man who would one day get credit for all his hard work.

The men and women who built the railroads, started our agricultural revolution, our industrial revolution, had to go through a period of abuse, ownership, and neglect. Will our machines suffer the same? I think they already are.

My boat never gets a moment of rest. I sit back, sun on my skin, a book in my hand, an iced tea sweating in a tall glass beside me. Yet somehow I’m the one sailing around the world.

The bamboo bench they’d wrangled together was nearly as uncomfortable as all the eyes of the courtroom drilling into the back of his skull.

on whether or not his offense was an executable one.”

5* Great story. Want more to know what happens and all the details of wht did happen

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?

Isn’t it funny that we call the acquisition of new technology “adopting”?

This was a yearning for which there was no word. It was shaped like a balloon the moment after bursting, a sphere of pure essence suddenly free, its edges already rippling into chaos.

Was intelligence related to life? Did one rely on the other?

And not that it had ever mattered.

4* Fun story

The regulation side of things hasn’t been explored enough in science fiction. And I don’t mean regulating the rules of AI, which Asimov broached and made famous. I mean the regulation of ownership. You can’t let every citizen have a brain that knows how to CRISPR up a terrible infectious disease. Or own a computer that can decrypt any electronic safeguard. Or one that can hack any other person, company, or country.

All the great plots of AI fiction are still to be told. Or we can simply wait for the headlines.

doing the opposite of what he was built for, choosing an action arrived at on his own.

5* I really like that ending to the story :')

There is too much normal left in the air. Being alive feels unnatural, a violation.

Every generation thinks it will be the last. There is some sickness in man, some paranoid delusion, some grandiose morbidity that runs right through to distant ancestors. Or maybe it is the fear in lonely hearts that they might die without company.

And the demons everywhere—they scattered.

Silo series: 5* Wow. Want more of each and every part! Just...dang! I think these are just a few sections from the whole series, definitely want to read it.

Letting go is hard. But it’s the only way to reach out and grab what’s next.

They gave me a uniform I was more familiar shooting at than buttoning across my chest, and somehow slid from a war between brothers to this frontier life hunting natives.