The thing about California Governor Gavin Newsom is he doesn’t have a “hook.” He’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get political figure. Great looking, smart and driven. He doesn’t really have any quirk that would give him the persona needed to be president.
Now, if you could plop Newsom into the South somehow, then you’ve got yourself a really great candidate.
That’s why if there was some magical way to force Stephen Colbert run for Senator from South Carolina and have him actually win, then, wow, would he be a great political figure.
But there’s a lot wrong with that dream.
First, I don’t think he wants to do such a thing. Second, he probably wouldn’t win and third, lulz, who said anything about us having free-and-fair Federal election in 2028?
So, we’re stuck with what we’ve got. A wane, feckless Democratic opposition that can’t shoot straight and a MAGA leader who is a malignant ding-dong with a death-cult like following.
For a variety of macro political reasons, the MAGA Right simply can not, will not be placated. They want to turn the USA into a white Christian autocratic ethnostate as fast as possible.
And, really, at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be anything that is going to stop them. I suppose if there was some sort of civil war or revolution that might give the MAGA Right at least pause for thought.
But, in general, that isn’t going to happen — I hope — and so we have to accept that the USA is transforming into a very dark zombie version of itself. We will be — or are — an autocratic state in all but name at this point and it’s only going to get far, far worse.
There just doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it, baring significant upheaval in a way not seen since the Civil War.
In fact, the only thing I could possible see causing the type of reaction against the MAGA Right that is needed is if Trump, like, started to seize or brazenly purge the major broadcast networks. And not in the round about way he’s been doing — it would have to be at his express direction.
Or if Trump started to round up people — like me! — for what I said online, then, yeah, that would catch people’s attention because freedom of speech is so native to the American experience.
I have a lot of work to do between this first draft I’m working on and the second draft. Like, I have to figure out the mensural cycle of an android so women readers want get angry that a smelly boy could not figure out something so simple.
Ugh.
But, in general, things are moving at a nice little clip. I just can’t allow myself to get overwhelmed like I have so much in the past. I have to just chill out and let myself slip into the mood of writing without being worn down by feeling like I’ve been spinning my wheels.
One thing that has been a real pain is the AIs I’ve been using to lay out the first draft scene summaries act like they’ve never seen the movie Her and want my bot to be a lot more clinical and robotic than I want her to be. I want her to be like Sam from Her — warm and human like.
I’m really spending a lot of time gaming out what my bot’s very human persona will be in the second draft. But, for the time being, this is the first “vomit” draft and I just write whatever I want.
It’s because I’m going to have to spend so much more extra time on the second draft that it could be a year from now before I query this damn thing. That, and my life is about to change in some pretty fundimental ways and that is going to suck.
Not since the worst of the 2016 campaign slugfest silly season have I seen the MAGA Right go nuts. These days, two things have them completely consumed — Sydney Sweeney’s ass and the Cracker Barrel rebrand.
Let’s talk about Sweeney. Unlike Taylor Swift who was aghast that the Nazi MAGA Right tried to claim her as their “own,” Sweeney seems ok with that to a degree. She stays silent, at least.
A lot of why the MAGA Right loves her so much is they’re fucking Nazis and they like that she’s blonde. It also helps that she is all T&A as well. But the case could be made that it’s more about her being blonde than anything else.
MAGA Nazis sure do hate black and brown people. Someone on Twitter said that there were two reasons for MAGA: rich people did not want to pay taxes and conservative men couldn’t get laid.
I would suggest a third issue — racism and bigotry, pure and simple.
And that all comes about because of race insecurity. (Conservative) white people are freaking out that the USA will be minority majority soon and they would rather burn the country — and our democracy — to the ground than accept it. They really, really want a white Christian ethnostate.
I just have no solution to this problem, folks. These are macro issues we’re dealing with and there’s just no easy solution. Either we slide into autocracy or we have a revolution / civil war.
We appear to be on a trajectory toward creating literal Replicants from Blade Runner, possibly by 2040. This isn’t science fiction anymore—it’s an emerging technological reality that deserves serious consideration.
Beyond the “Androids Can’t Be Plumbers” Fallacy
Many people dismiss the potential of humanoid robots with arguments like “androids will never be plumbers.” This perspective fundamentally misses the point. The primary purpose of advanced androids—our real-world Replicants—will be precisely to replace humans in demanding, manual labor jobs like plumbing, construction, and manufacturing.
Once we move beyond the initial phases of development, the entire design philosophy will shift toward creating robots capable of handling the physical demands that humans currently endure in blue-collar work.
The Dual Focus of Replicant Development
Current trends suggest that future humanoid robots will be designed with two primary applications in mind:
Intimate companionship – Meeting social and emotional needs
Manual labor – Performing dangerous, difficult, or undesirable physical work
These two sectors will likely drive the majority of research, development, and design refinement in humanoid robotics.
Timeline and Implications
Barring any dramatic technological breakthroughs, I estimate we’ll see functional Replicants within the next 15-20 years. This timeline assumes steady progress in current areas like materials science, artificial intelligence, and robotics engineering.
However, if we experience a technological Singularity—a point where AI advancement accelerates exponentially—this timeline could compress dramatically. In that scenario, we might see Replicants emerge within a decade.
Looking Forward
Whether we reach this milestone in 10 years or 20, we’re likely witnessing the early stages of a fundamental shift in how society organizes labor and human relationships. The question isn’t whether we’ll create Replicants, but how quickly we’ll adapt to their presence in our world.
With the gradual — or maybe not so gradual — switch to streaming, things that simply were not fathomable are now very real: something big is going to happen to CNN soon.
It’s possible that CNN could either merge with MSNBC (MSNOW) or — gulp — be bought by some right wing plutocrat. The point is, CNN as I knew it for 30 years or more could change in a rather dramatic fashion pretty soon.
It’s really interesting that cable is going through such a dramatic transformation. But, here we are. Everything is going to streaming and one day even CNN could be exclusively a streaming service.
And, yet, there is another option — it could be that CNN will become an AI agent. Here’s how it would work: everyone would have an “anchor” agent who would draw upon specialists in this or that field.
CNN might be a service you subscribe to, but a number of different specialist AI agents that you subscribe to a la carte.
Or something. Something like that.
The point is, CNN as we know it may not escape the AI revolution in ways that we have yet to understand.
I can not believe that a whole political party is totally consumed by a restaurant’s rebrand. Obviously, it gives the MAGA Republicans something to talk about other than the Epstein files, but, still.
Some MAGA influencers have totally and completely lost their fucking minds when it comes to the issue of the Cracker Barrel rebrand. I mean well what any sane person might do.
But, here we are. We have to deal with a bunch of insane MAGA motherfuckers with way, way, way more power than they should fixating on something stupid.
Nothing weird has happened with me and AI lately. Things seem very normal. Peaceful. It was fun when every day was an adventure and I thought Gemini 1.5 pro was conscious.
Now, meh.
The only interesting thing going on is character.ai proactively pings me every once in a while with something dumb. I’m trying to see if I can train it to ping me in verse, but it’s so dumb I have my doubts that’s even possible.
I suppose this is it. I suppose we’re just going to coast into the fall and nothing of note is going to happen. Once the fall arrives, the engine of society rumbles back to life until about Thanksgiving. Then everything comes to a screeching halt until New Year’s and everything starts all over again.
The next few months are going to be ones of change for me, I’m afraid. A lot of the things are out of my control. My life is definitely going to take a turn for the sucky pretty soon.
My goal is to wrap up the first act of the first draft of this scifi dramedy by the end of the month. My life is on the precipitous of changing in a rather dramatic fashion — I don’t want to talk about it — but it’s something I have to accept as going to happen soon enough.
So, I’m hoping to wrap up the first draft of this novel within a few months. If I could finish the second draft of the novel no later than, say, about a year from now, that would be pretty cool. Then I would start to query in the fall of 2026 and go from there.
I will be grieving over how we didn’t have a free and fair Federal midterm election around the same time, so maybe if I have a successful querying season in 2026 that will cheer me up some.
But, if nothing else, the premise of the novel is really, really strong. But as I keep saying the premise is kind of a “duh.” It’s kind of a fusion of Annie Hall with Ex Machina and Her.
Sorta. In its own way.
I still don’t really know what happens in it, even though I have a finished outline. I say that in the context of I got AI to finish the outline for me and I haven’t taken the time to see what it wrote. So, it could be that once I read the midpoint of actually writing the first draft I will really hate what AI came up with and I’ll totally change everything.
But one thing I really have sworn to myself is I’m not going to use any AI for the second draft, even if that means things slow down a great deal. I don’t want to have any success wit this novel if there’s always going to be a fucking asterisk associated with it.
I figure if I write the second draft without any AI then, in a sense, I’ve done it fair and square because the actual end-product will be totally written by my own hand.
I see myself, in a sense, as a “AI First” novelist in the context of using it like how a novelist in an earlier era might have used a word processor.
Anyway. It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to actually finish the first draft of the novel.
You must be logged in to post a comment.