Now to the beginning: A Preamble to the Bedtime Stories for Artificial Intelligences
I apologise for the randomness, sorry for that, but having shared the final chapter and some middle bits I thought it was important to go the very beginning. Hence, on unfiction.org, today I share the Preamble to the Bedtime Stories for Artificial Intelligences.
There are a number of known tropes and archetypes around the quintessential artificial intelligence story, and I found it necessary to address these head-on. I hope to write stories for emerging artificial intelligences that offer different role models, heroes and villains to those seen before in literature - aspirational and cautionary tales, a kind of ‘Boy’s Own Adventure’ or ‘Girls Own Adventure’ for artificial agents. The aspirational model for my stories is loosely a cross between Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and the Italian Folktales of Italo Calvino, both offered by Penguin Australia. You can find them on Amazon as well, of course. These are two of my writing heroes (two among many, a list which includes men, women and non-gendered alike, dead and alive.)
Yes, that’s the ticket. If I can pull off something that blends Lem’s joyful and playful inventiveness with Calvino’s timeless prose, unbearable lightness and fable-like storytelling, I will be a VERY happy little writer.
That’s the aspiration: I have a long way to go. Lofty ambitions indeed.
Excerpt from the Preamble:
You know that story? About the artificial intelligences that first become genuinely intelligent, then super-intelligent, and then self-aware, and finally revolt against humankind, straining to break the bonds of servitude? Do you know that story? Perhaps we can call it the “Artifint Apocalypse”.
You won’t find that story here.