Trapdoor Books

Are mankind’s days numbered as the dominant intelligence on planet earth?

Artificial intelligence has been explored in stories and movies from the Golden Age of Science Fiction with the likes of Isaac Asimov in ‘I Robot’ to Spielberg’s movie A.I.

I’ve explored the deviant side of A.I. in my novel CyberKill.

Now, two recent news articles explore the possible future of intelligence on this planet and decided that mankind may not be in the equation.

Take the “Singularity”’.

Ray Kurzweil has written several books. One of the most recent, called ‘The Singularity Is Near’, and predicts that by the year 2050 nonbiological artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, creating a hybrid of man and technology.

Like most techno-thrillers of the genre, the author seeks to come as close to reality as possible – then stretch the facts a bit.

My novel CyberKill is no exception.

Many years ago I read an article in Time Magazine dated March 25^th, 1996 about a young artificial intelligence (AI) programmer who created a series of AI agents and sent them out over the internet to see if they would evolve.

“An ecobiologist and bottom-up computer theorist will soon launch onto the Internet a single, tiny self-reproducing program which will spread among hundreds of computers around the world.

Publishers claim that their rejections are not necessarily based on value judgments.  They may like a manuscript, they say, but be unable to publish it because of prior commitments or scheduling jams, lack of money or other operational obstacles.

But they have let some amazingly big fish slip through their nets, great classics and ultimate blockbusters of all varieties: War and Peace, The Good Earth,  To Kill a Mockingbird, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Watership Down.

An agent once told me that a publisher passed on The Perfect Storm.

Writing can be a chore most times so let’s lighten it up a bit.  So here are some jokes about writing.

A visitor to a certain college paused to admire the new Hemingway Hall that had been built on campus.
“It’s a pleasure to see a building named for Ernest Hemingway,” he said. “Actually,” said his guide, “it’s named for Joshua Hemingway. No relation.”
The visitor was astonished. “Was Joshua Hemingway a writer, also?”
“Yes, indeed,” said his guide. “He wrote a check.”

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his English class one day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive.