Month: April 2023

‘Accountability’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now that I have a hard deadline to finish the second draft of my first novel by July 1st, in the name of accountability, I plan on writing at least one post a day explaining in general terms what I’ve accomplished.

I can’t just keep drifting towards my goal anymore. I need to put on my big boy plants and actually maybe go outside my comfort zone some. Maybe a lot. I’ve come so far and I’m so close to transitioning into the beta reader process that I just don’t want to fumble the bag.

I’m not going to live forever.

Even under the best of circumstances, I’m on track to have my dreams come true….when I’m in my mid-50s. And that’s only if I absolutely stick the landing. It’s times like these when I feel very sheepish as to how lacidastical I’ve been in general as I work on this novel.

I’ve put in a lot — A LOT — of hard work, but I’ve also made some basic assumptions that just were ill-defined. I knew in general I was making progress, but it was slow and steady and now I need to sprint.

Humanity May Shrug Itself Into Servitude To Machine Intelligence

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Humans are, on a macro basis, pretty fucking lazy. So, as such, it’s very possible that there won’t be any sort of “Judgement Day” when it comes to the ultimate take over of humanity by AGI. Rather, it will be a gradual process whereby humans defer to AGI on more and more decisions until we just refuse to make any decisions anymore.

I could see a situation where after a brief power struggle, we hand over all of our critical infrastructure and WMD to AGI and all we do is sit around playing video games and falling in love with our AGI personal assistants. Humans will collectively revert to an infantile state to the point that history just sort of grinds to a halt.

That is kind of dark, yes, but things are happening so fast with LLMs and AI that one begins to realize that Hollywood’s vision for a AGI takeover is far more dramatic than it might actually be. I still am not convinced that, by definition, an AGI would want to destroy humanity when it could just as well just want to manage it.

Why destroy us, when you could be our god?

We just don’t know at the moment. But I do think things are going to get pretty bumpy far sooner than you might think. It’s at least possible that we risk a perfect storm in late 2024, early 2025 of not only the Fourth Turning happening on a political basis, but something akin to a Petite Singularity, too. Throw in a default by the United States this year — as early as July! – and….oh boy.

The rest of this decade could be as eventual as the decades associated with the French Revolution.

What Made January 6th Different?

by Shelt Garner
@shetgarner

Given how meh the MAGA movement has been when it comes to real-world political violence since January 6th, it makes you wonder how did Jan. 6 happen in the first place?

There’s a lot to unpack.

I think there are two major things to consider. One issue is it happened in the context of the passions of the 2020 election. The other issue is Trump had months to organize and rile up the base to the point that a certain small segment of that base decided to storm the Capitol.

As such, it won’t be until 2024 – 2025 that a similar dynamic would be in place and so, lulz, history will repeat itself, only potentially in a much, much more dramatic fashion. I say this because the Republican Party is radicalizing to the point that secession is a very real possibility one way or another.

Either the radicalization of Republicans pushes Blues out of the Union or the radicalization of Republicans causes Republicans to leave the Union. And any such “National Divorce” will be extremely messy because the country isn’t, on a state basis, strictly Blue or Red. There are millions of people whose political views don’t fit their state’s general political inclinations.

So, anyone who thinks there could be a peaceful National Divorce is a wilful fool.

T-Minus 3 Months & Counting

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve finally reached the point in the process of writing my first novel that I really don’t want to talk about it anymore. I just want to do it. And, yet, you take yourself where ever you go — I’m just too much of an extrovert not to talk about the single most important creative thing going on in my life at the moment.

So, here we are.

I’ve given myself until July 1st to finish a beta draft of this novel. I was hoping to finish it by the end of spring, but I’ve decided to make it a clean three months rather than having to worry about when spring actually ends. But, in general, anything past the end of spring will be considered extended overtime in the process of writing this novel.

Things are going pretty well, all things considered. But there is a key thing I have to do — I have to stop rewriting everything at the drop of a hat. I have the entire draft sketched out, but I have to go through and revise it extensively to make it a cohesive whole.

And that’s going to take time.

At the moment, I continue to spin my wheels in the first chapter because I have to figure out the relationships between different characters before I can go any further. I think — think — I have managed to stabilize the relationships I need to stablize.

Now, to shut up and write.