“We mustn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where’s the joy in these [...]
“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn––and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: [...]
“Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around, suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them [...]
“I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.” ––We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, pg. 298 “Will machines supplant human workers or augment them? On one level, they will do both. But once again, [...]
If you decide to read one piece of nonfiction this summer, let this be it. Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future is one of the most intelligent and important works of futurism to date. Although the book’s title might trigger images of popcorn and 3D glasses rather [...]
“In an interview with CBS News, the president of the United States was asked if the nation’s dire unemployment problem was likely to improve soon. ‘There’s no magic solution,’ he replied. ‘To even stand still we have to move very fast.’ By this, he meant that the economy needs to create tens of thousands of [...]
“‘You see, Princess Nell, you have conquered this world today, and now that you have conquered it, you’ll find it a rather boring place. Now it’s your responsibility to make new worlds for other people to explore and conquer.’ King Coyote waved his hand out the window into the vast, empty white space where once [...]
“Some people come here because they are on a quest of some sort––trying to find a lost lover, or to understand why something terrible happened in their lives, or why there is cruelty in the world, or why they aren’t satisfied with their career. Society has never been good at answering these questions––the sorts of [...]
“Princess Nell’s recent travels through the lands of King Coyote, and the various castles with their increasingly sophisticated computers that were, in the end, nothing more than Turing machines, had caught her up in a bewildering logical circle. In Castle Turing she had learned that a Turing machine could not really understand a human being. [...]
“‘There are only two industries. This has always been true,’ said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. ‘There is the industry of things, and the industry of [...]