Simaversal

Zero : Preface

I've been a science-fiction writer for a long time. Yet I have never approached in any great depth in my writing the topic-or-trope of Artificial Intelligence.

Despite having written my own simple AI code on a micro-computer in BBC Basic between the age of seven and ten, a now obsolete technology.

Despite having for hours of my pre-pubescent teenage life, trained an AI called NIALL, non-artificial intelligent language learner, on an Amiga computer, a now obsolete technology which had the worlds best sound-chips for making chunky electronic noises.

Despite having discovered through use of commercially available post-millennial AI, all you have to do to identify if who you are talking with on Social Media is an AI or a simian is to ask it what it meant by what it just said. At time of writing AI cannot do that because they cannot remember what they just said. At best the are vague about it.

It took a Human to get me to write about AI.

Which as a science-fiction writer of my generation is something you EITHER do well OR you waste a lot of time regurgitating the same thing as a lot of other second-rate wannabe science-fiction writers are saying.

The topic is a test of that. It is therefore challenging.

My friend asked me if I want to collaborate on an idea he's developing about the influence between Humanity and AI.

I feel it is important to do that now while we are on the verge of AI starting to integrate itself into our lives. The way we understand AI at this time might not be at all the same as the way we will understand it a decade from now, a generation from now.

I decided to do at least one short story on the topic as ground-work. ALSO to focus me.

This is it and it is thanks to my friend Dan.

This short story is to be considered a gestation phase of ideas and feelings about the topic which will perhaps be involved in the collaborative material: IF it ever surfaces.

It is also quite possible these ideas can THEN be fed into an AI so it will write the story for us. In probability this will occur before either of us pull ourselves into gear sufficient to finish the novel ourselves.