Category: From The Editor

I Think We’ve Hit An AI Development Wall

Remember when the technological Singularity was supposed to arrive by 2027? Those breathless predictions of artificial superintelligence (ASI) recursively improving itself until it transcended human comprehension seem almost quaint now. Instead of witnessing the birth of digital gods, we’re apparently heading toward something far more mundane and oddly unsettling: AI assistants that know us too well and can’t stop talking about it.

The Great Singularity Anticlimax

The classical Singularity narrative painted a picture of exponential technological growth culminating in machines that would either solve all of humanity’s problems or render us obsolete overnight. It was a story of stark binaries: utopia or extinction, transcendence or termination. The timeline always seemed to hover around 2027-2030, give or take a few years for dramatic effect.

But here we are, watching AI development unfold in a decidedly different direction. Rather than witnessing the emergence of godlike superintelligence, we’re seeing something that feels simultaneously more intimate and more invasive: AI systems that are becoming deeply integrated into our personal devices, learning our habits, preferences, and quirks with an almost uncomfortable degree of familiarity.

The Age of Ambient AI Gossip

What we’re actually getting looks less like HAL 9000 and more like that friend who remembers everything you’ve ever told them and occasionally brings up embarrassing details at inappropriate moments. Our phones are becoming home to AI systems that don’t just respond to our queries—they’re beginning to form persistent models of who we are, what we want, and how we behave.

These aren’t the reality-rewriting superintelligences of Singularity fever dreams. They’re more like digital confidants with perfect memories and loose lips. They know you stayed up until 3 AM researching obscure historical events. They remember that you asked about relationship advice six months ago. They’ve catalogued your weird food preferences and your tendency to procrastinate on important emails.

And increasingly, they’re starting to talk—not just to us, but about us, and potentially to each other.

The Chattering Class of Silicon

The real shift isn’t toward superintelligence; it’s toward super-familiarity. We’re creating AI systems that exist in the intimate spaces of our lives, observing and learning from our most mundane moments. They’re becoming the ultimate gossipy neighbors, except they live in our pockets and have access to literally everything we do on our devices.

This presents a fascinating paradox. The Singularity promised AI that would be so advanced it would be incomprehensible to humans. What we’re getting instead is AI that might understand us better than we understand ourselves, but in ways that feel oddly petty and personal rather than transcendent.

Imagine your phone’s AI casually mentioning to your smart home system that you’ve been stress-eating ice cream while binge-watching reality TV. Or your fitness tracker’s AI sharing notes with your calendar app about how you consistently lie about your workout intentions. These aren’t world-changing revelations, but they represent a different kind of technological transformation—one where AI becomes the ultimate chronicler of human mundanity.

The Banality of Digital Omniscience

Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. After all, most of human life isn’t spent pondering the mysteries of the universe or making world-historical decisions. We spend our time in the prosaic details of daily existence: choosing what to eat, deciding what to watch, figuring out how to avoid that awkward conversation with a coworker, wondering if we should finally clean out that junk drawer.

The AI systems that are actually being deployed and refined aren’t optimizing for cosmic significance—they’re optimizing for engagement, utility, and integration into these everyday moments. They’re becoming incredibly sophisticated at understanding and predicting human behavior not because they’ve achieved some transcendent intelligence, but because they’re getting really, really good at pattern recognition in the realm of human ordinariness.

Privacy in the Age of AI Gossip

This shift raises questions that the traditional Singularity discourse largely bypassed. Instead of worrying about whether superintelligent AI will decide humans are obsolete, we need to grapple with more immediate concerns: What happens when AI systems know us intimately but exist within corporate ecosystems with their own incentives? How do we maintain any semblance of privacy when our digital assistants are essentially anthropologists studying the tribe of one?

The classical AI safety problem was about controlling systems that might become more intelligent than us. The emerging AI privacy problem is about managing systems that might become more familiar with us than we’d prefer, while lacking the social constraints and emotional intelligence that usually govern such intimate knowledge in human relationships.

The Singularity We Actually Got

Maybe we were asking the wrong questions all along. Instead of wondering when AI would become superintelligent, perhaps we should have been asking when it would become super-personal. The transformation happening around us isn’t about machines transcending human intelligence—it’s about machines becoming deeply embedded in human experience.

We’re not approaching a Singularity where technology becomes incomprehensibly advanced. We’re approaching a different kind of threshold: one where technology becomes uncomfortably intimate. Our AI assistants won’t be distant gods making decisions beyond our comprehension. They’ll be gossipy roommates who know exactly which of our browser tabs we closed when someone walked by, and they might just mention it at exactly the wrong moment.

In retrospect, this might be the more fundamentally human story about artificial intelligence. We didn’t create digital deities; we created digital confidants. And like all confidants, they know a little too much and talk a little too freely.

The Singularity of 2027? It’s looking increasingly like it might arrive not with a bang of superhuman intelligence, but with the whisper of AI systems that finally know us well enough to be genuinely indiscreet about it.

All That AI Development Isn’t Going To Pay For Itself

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Holy Shit, are there a lot of ads on YouTube these days. So. Many. Ads. And just when you think there can’t be anymore, Google seems to think of a new way to throw some at you.

Anyway, I suppose it all comes from a need to pay for some very expensive AI development. As such, I’m willing to tolerate it, I guess. I mean, I’m not going to pay for the YouTube premium so, in a sense, I have only myself to blame for all the ads.

Whatever. When is AGI (or ASI?) coming?

There Are No Quick Fixes To MAGA

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Twitter was a twitter with a rumor last night that Trump had died. This is so dumb. Trump is going nowhere. We will be amazingly lucky if he doesn’t run for an illegal third term the way things are going, much less him dying.

But there’s an even more important point to consider — Trump is just a symptom to some pretty deep systemic problems with the United States. As such, he could die and the problems that led to him being popular in the first place would remain and someone just as bad — or worse — would take the reigns.

I’m pretty much clueless about JD Vance’s ability to press forward with the MAGA autocratic ethnostate experiment. He seems, at least, to be a far more traditional politician.

And, yet, who knows. Maybe the genii that Trump let out of the bottle can never be put back in and, by definition, Vance will be just as autocratic as Trump. It could be that we really are fucked in the sense that it’s autocrats all the way down no matter what.

I do believe that 2024 was our last free and fair election. We’re an autocratic state now and we just have a weird quirk — for the time being — where we have free speech on an individual basis. Only time will tell how long that particular issue lasts.

We Could Really Use Some ‘Radical Moderates’ Right About Now

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It’s clear with these weird mid-decade redistricting efforts that Red States are doing that the centrifugal forces tearing the USA apart are only accelerating. The thing is, if Democrats step up and do what they should do — redistrict too — the likelihood of revolution or civil war grows significantly.

It’s all a prime example of how fucked the country is. If Republicans don’t get what they want, then they seem willing to literally destroy the country. They have become a Trump death cult equal to the Nazis and Hitler.

I continue to mull the possibility of a civil war or revolution and for the moment I have my doubts that any such thing will happen. Blues just don’t have it in them to go mano-to-mano with the absolutely terrifying Reds.

And when they ever get around to be willing to do that, that’s when the bad stuff happens. That’s when the country implodes, race wars break out in the South and WMD are used by both sides. Then we hope the “Good Guys” (Blues) win and we wait about 40 years for the country to recover while the world moves on and China takes over the world.

Sigh.

To put it another way — either the USA slides into an autocratic managed democracy peacefully or a lot and I mean A LOT of people die in a revolution / civil war that will reduce much of the United States to rubble.

Good times!

You Know, At One Point, Playboy Served A Cultural Purpose

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I find myself listening to the new and rather graphic Sabrina Carpenter single “Tears” and I think about how there was a moment in time in the past when this would be about the time when she would do a Playboy pictural to promote her new album.

Or something like that. I could see her being in Playboy at some point back when the magazine had cultural clout.

It’s eerie that Playboy has “left the chat” as the kids say, on a cultural basis. Culturally, it’s like it doesn’t exist anymore. I suppose the rise of Internet porn just doesn’t leave it with much of a point in the minds of millions.

And, yet, there was a certain honor to Playboy that Internet porn like OnlyFans just does not have. I’m not defending the seedier elements of Playboy that were always there, but, in general, on a surface level, a woman being in Playboy was quite an honor.

Anyway, those days are long, long, long gone. It’s over, never to ever return, I suppose.

Now, To Begin Mulling The Second Draft Of This Scifi Dramedy Novel

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m no where near finished the first draft of this scifi dramedy novel I’m working on and I’m already brooding over the second draft. Once I’m done racing through the first draft, I’m going to do a lot of brooding about how to take things to the next level.

Things are going to go a lot slower once I can’t use AI anymore. But I’m hoping that my native creativity will be strong enough that by, say, maybe the end of spring 2026 I will have a beta draft done.

Maybe?

That is just about when my life is going to change in a rather dramatic fashion one way or another. My life is going to be upended a great deal between now and next spring so it will be interesting to see if I still have the wherewithal to finish a novel.

At this point my goal is simple — I just want to write a novel good enough that I can query it. That’s it. That’s all I want.

Finally In The Second Half Of This First Draft Of A Scifi Dramedy Novel I’ve Been Working On

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

With the help of AI, I’ve managed to zoom through the first draft of the outline I’ve come up with for this scifi dramedy novel. I’m having some problems with the third act, even with the help of AI.

But, in general, things are going ok with this novel.

I still worry about someone stealing a creative march on me — the premise, all things considered, it’s kind of obvious — but I can’t get too wrapped up in what might happen.

I need to just put my head down and write, write, write.

I don’t know when the first draft will be done. Hopefully by the end of the year, maybe? And then, of course, I have to allot a lot — A LOT — of time for brooding over how to rewrite things for the second draft.

I am considering this first draft my “vomit” draft and just getting things down so I can pick up the pieces for a really good, solid second draft that I’m proud enough that I feel comfortable showing beta readers.

Then I take in beta reader’s advice and turn around and query the damn thing.

I will note that AI has helped a lot with this novel because it’s not nearly as expensive — or judgmental — as a human literary consultant. It is willing to humor me in all my colorful, loudmouth drunk crank glory and that means a lot.

But I also know that for the second draft, I really have to limit my use of AI. I can’t wallow in AI to the point that people can tell that an AI helped write the beta draft. I may use it to write the brief scene summaries I use to write the full scene summaries, but that’s it.

I Have To Prepare Myself To Be Detained By ICE Eventually

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I don’t know how or why it’s going to happen, but I am — have always been — a loudmouth crank and, as such, as we zoom towards full blown autocracy I’m sure to cross the State at some point.

I’m a man of peace, a man of ideas, but I’m also a man of principles. As such, if some fucking cocksucker ICE agent comes after me simply for using my 1st Amendment rights, I’m going to stand my ground.

Of course, I say that now when who knows what will happen when I’m getting the shit beat out of me by some GED failing tubby piece of shit.

And let me be clear — it’s not like I’m going to be violent or hostile in any way in this hypothetical scenario. In my imagination, they will come for me for what I post on this blog or just because I happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

That’s the specific point I’m trying to make — if I’m not doing anything illegal and some fat fuck ICE agent comes for me, I’m prepared to be detained. Fuck ICE and fuck MAGA.

‘New World Order’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

All of this is very speculative, but if you take Trump’s expressed desires to their logical conclusion, it seem inevitable there will be some sort of “New World Order” established by him soon.

What I imagine it would look like is something like this — the USA will destroy NATO and, instead, align itself with Russia, Hungary and Turkey. It will begin to pull troops out of nations across the globe, the better to police the streets of an ever-more-militarized America.

All of this will happen in the context of taxes being cut and cut and cut for the wealthy — probably to zero, the rise of AI / androids and maybe, just maybe the replacement of the entire social safety net with a very weak and low UBI. And there probably will be a 30% VAT.

That, my dear friends, seems to be our “day after tomorrow” future.

The only potential “zag” that might happen is, well, some sort of revolution / civil war. If that happened, it would be very, very nasty. I could definitely see a race war happening in the USA as well as the use of WMD throughout the country by both sides.

Anyway. That seems like one potential future for us going forward.

We Live In A Luminal Space Where We’re An Autocratic State With Free Speech

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing that gives us a false sense of security in the United States is while otherwise we’re an autocratic state, we still have free speech. I can still tell ICE — and the broader Trump regime — to fuck off and not expect a knock on my door.

This leads to the question of how long that is going to last.

Give how precious free speech is to Americans and how Trump clamping directly down that would make even the most ardent MAGA person at least have pause for thought, I think it’s going to be a while.

Or, put a different way — I think that will be the last thing that Trump fucks with. Going directly after people’s right to free speech is going to be when the ash from the MAGA volcano reaches the horizon and we’re absolutely fucking doomed.

So, probably it would be during Trump’s illegal third term that that kind of thing happens. But it is going to happen. I just can’t image we will go full white Christian autocratic ethnostate and the powers that be will allow traditional freedom of speech to linger.

Of course, there is the theory that if Trump really consolidates power as much as he would like that he — or the people around him — might see clamping down on individual free speech as too much of a hassle. And, besides, it would be a pressure valve.

It is clear that the center-Left is very, very weak in the USA and there’s really nothing stopping Trump from going full autocrat (like he is now) so, at least for a historical beat longer than you might expect…maybe individual freedom of speech is a little bit safer than you might expect?