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Seattle Space Needle and Robot Men
It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to write a post. My deep dark secret of marketing is new folks on the list get every email I ever wrote eventually. Folks who’ve been here a while and aren’t on the weekly train anymore will only get updates like this.
So, what have I been doing with my life? I went to Seattle this summer and went up the Space Needle with my family in addition to that glass blowing museum. I got to say, the outdoor garden on the grounds of the museum looks like a Star Trek set with alien plants growing everywhere. I’m not an art critic, but it’s a cool place.
I also like seeing the street performers who are living their artist dream no matter how peculiar, by doing performance art and Seattle had a lot of them. The city had your standard ones like the electric violin player you get in almost every city to the robot guy dressed with metallic paint. If there was an award for robot guy performance art, I think Seattle is winning this one, or at least a contender.
The guy had a kinda weird uncle sam/eighties action hero getup complete with oversized rifle gun, but that wasn’t what made him stick out. While I’m sure Hulk Hogan dressed in metallic paint would stick out in a crowd, this guy took it one step further, he added an auditory experience to the act when he moved. Being a man dressed as a robot, you’d think it would be a pneumatic hiss or grinding of servos, but no, it was a squeaky toy.
So picture a Hulk Hogan looking like dude dressed as a eighties action American hero robot, but with squeaky sounds when he moved around. I don’t think I ever witnessed a robot quirk like it. My son, who’s nine and once criticized Metallica’s One during the heaviest metal moment of all heavy metal history by asking (when does the song start rocking?), wasn’t a fan of the man. When the bot man tried to engage my son with his squeaky antics, my kid frowned and went the other way.
Still, I got to say, I’ve seen people dressed as robots, but none quite like the guy outside the Space Needle in Seattle.
He still doesn’t hold a candle to my favorite street performer of all time, The Famous Bushman of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. That was a dude who just held a tree branch in front of his face and jumped out and scared people. Trust me when I say he wasn’t that well-hidden, but man when we ate at a restaurant and happened to get a table overlooking where the guy was “hiding” that day, it was one of the more amusing dining experiences of my life.
Get your copy of Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers!
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From the Vaults: The Bill of Economic Rights
I wrote this a while ago. I wanted to reference it on my website. I realize it went out as as an email but never a blog post. I do believe a lot of it still holds true. I also cut a large intro that went in the email version to get right to the heart of the post.
If I don’t like how society treats people, I can create a better one by writing a book. Even though my ideas might be impossible to achieve, I think it’s worth writing them down because maybe someone else with more political savvy than me can put them into practice or at least use the principles behind them to improve the lives of people everywhere.
So here’s my big idea to make the world a better place. Now, I know that I risk oversimplifying, and I’m probably not thinking of everything. But that’s why I’m releasing this out into the universe. Maybe someone will read it, improve it, and make it a better system. I don’t know if a system will ever achieve a utopia on Earth, and there will always be room for improvement. However, I do believe it’s better than what we have now.
Lucky for me, as a science fiction writer, I get to just think of the big idea and not the logistics of making it happen. Anyway, here is the big idea, mix capitalism and socialism together. I know there are places already doing that, like Denmark and Sweden, but what I’m suggesting here is a radical, sweeping change that will take the best capitalism has to offer and blend it with socialism’s greatest hits. I want to make a system that will ensure every human has a minimum standard of living but the incentive to work their butts off for any slices bigger than the minimum.
It all starts with housing, and the science backs me up on this one. Drug addiction, crime recidivism, and even just finding a job are really tough without stable housing. So in my new world, housing is a human right. Everyone shall be provided housing. In the Robin Hood of Couches, I envision this via the “blocks” part of town. Basically, every human gets a ten-foot cube. Families may connect their cubes for a larger unit. Still, each person in the family is allocated a ten-foot cube. In my sci-fi near-future world, the cubes are 3D printed and moveable, so a birth in the family just requires a little rearranging to add that ten feet.
The second human right is food. All people will have access to food instead of dealing with messy programs like EBT. I just used Star Trek like replicators where people can print the food their family and are allocated a certain amount of raw material per day. In reality, I can see just creating a free food store. Any person can go in, get what they need (to a limit, like they can only take 3 boxes of macaroni each week per person or something like that), and bring it home. For people who need more than the minimums the store can charge overage at check out.
The third human right is transportation. If people can’t get to places, then society can’t function. A free subway or bus system seems an easy solution. I’m sure we can use some of the money saved by cutting EBT and replacing it with the free food store.
Then, of course, there is medical care, communication, and education. Yes, I’m one of those radical hippies who thinks college education should be free and subsidized by the government. It’s an investment that pays for itself in the long run in addition to access to college education and health care (Another way to save money. American health care is expensive and also not that great. The industry has peddled a lot of misinformation about socialized healthcare systems, which I don’t have time for in this post).
However, let me make a case for communication being a right because I think education and health care are already well documented by people making it their lives mission to bring about such change in our society. Communication is important to maintain a minimum standard of living. The internet is so critical to our daily lives that imagine how challenging it would be to live without it. It’s right up there with utilities (like electricity, water, and in my fictional future: access to the pipeline that makes sure the replicators have the raw material to make their clothes, food, even their couch).
By now, you might be thinking, that all sounds lovely, Aaron, but isn’t that socialism? What’s that capitalism, socialism marriage you promised? That’s where the free market can play an important role. Do you want a big-screen TV for your cube? Find a job. Need some cash for a trip to Disneyland? Go work! Want more space than one cube? A luxury apartment, a yacht, a mansion? Go for it! Take that bull market by the horns and ride your way to wealth. Just don’t threaten other people’s minimum standard of living on your way.
What about all the freeloaders? The ones who won’t work? Let them! Some people are not cut out for the rat race, whether it’s injury, disability, mental health, or just plain they don’t want to do it. That’s fine. Just let them find fulfillment in life in their own way. Many people who are willing to work for a larger slice of the pie will do all the jobs we need to keep society going. Those people will be rewarded with cool cars, non-government issued clothing, trips to Disneyland, or whatever the heck they want to spend their money on.
The biggest thing about American culture, and maybe this is even a global thing, is that we emphasize work to fulfill ourselves. Yet, most people are working less to satisfy themselves and more just to make sure they aren’t homeless or don’t starve. What if it didn’t have to be that way?
Employers couldn’t be assholes. They would have to treat their workers with respect, pay wages that encourage people to go to the job, and actually do the right thing over the choice that makes them more money. In a society where work is optional, there will still be people who work because there will always be people not satisfied by the minimum. However, if we decouple people’s ability to survive with work, I’d think we are all the better for it. We would at least not be staying in a shit job because we need to pay the rent.
In summary, if I were creating a new Bill of Rights. One that ensured everyone would have a minimum standard of living. Here is what I’d add:
1. Every person shall have access to housing and utilities to make it livable.
2. Every person shall have access to food to ensure a healthy lifestyle.
3. Every person shall have access to public transportation.
4. Every person shall have access to health care, education, and internet.
5. Every person shall have the right to work if they want more than the minimum.
I know my bill of rights is missing protections against racism, unlawful search and seizure, and so forth. Still, we already got amendments for some of those, and good people working on what it’s lacking. Think of my section of the Bill of Rights as the economy section. As if someone asked me, “Hey Aaron, how should we run our economy?” The five points above are my answer.
If you want to see a world where this system is the backdrop to a murder mystery, check out my novel The Robin Hood of Couches. Not only do I create a near-future world that I feel is better than the current one, but I also have a heap to say about subscription services taking over our lives and what happens when they go awry.
And it starts with a dead body that our hero, Reese, a financial crimes investigator, finds in a ditch.
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AI Statement Part I: Common Complaints
I’m gonna probably get some hate for this but I’m going to say it because I think it needs to be talked about. I use AI, have a subscription to one, and will probably continue to use it. That being said, I don’t draft chapters for my Aaron Frale books nor do I use it to think of plot ideas (I got plenty of those in my own head). If you want to see how I use it exactly skip to part five, but suffice to say, my writing process is still largely the same pre-AI compared to post-AI.
But before I talk about what I use it for, I want to address some common complaints:
AI is screwing up the environment/hiking up power bills. Yes, true. But that’s more fumble on regulation than anything. Water in a data center can be recycled over and over with closed-loop cooling, though plenty of data centers still use evaporative systems that don’t recycle it. With good engineering and regulation, water usage can be mitigated. As for power usage, that’s regulation too. Often, the power bills spike because of the upgrades needed to power them. Make the company pay for it, or charge them a premium and give breaks to the local consumer, or here’s an idea, build solar panels and wind farms on the same land. We can control the power and water usage if we choose. Also, there are companies that want to build datacenters in space. It’s probably a decade or so from being practical, but honestly that’s the best idea I’ve heard yet. Pushing a data center out of a community will just result in them being built elsewhere, why not incentivize companies to build them in space?
AI is theft. Trust me when I say I know this one well. My work was used to train models without my consent. And that’s the sticking point for me, consent. Not the fact that it used my work. Pretty much all creative work stands on the shoulders of its predecessors. I read Douglas Adams and loved Mel Brooks and Monty Python. The Time Burrito book series is a product of my love for those books and movies. I don’t think it’s fair for it to be labeled as inspiration when I do it, and theft when the machines do it.
AI-generated writing and human writing (aka meat writing), are processing art forms (be in my life experience or an algorithm) and creating something new. The only difference to me is that I have the advantage of making intuitive leaps and abstract thinking, and the machine has the advantage of being able to read every single thing ever written about a topic and synthesizing the result. It’s two different methods to create a new form of writing that I don’t think as theft.
AI is stealing work from artist, writers, consultants, etc. I think that’s more what people mean when they say, “AI is theft.” This argument is more about the economic loss of people who provide cover art, consultant services, book trailer videos, and even the writers who lose precious sales to completely AI generated books. The economic loss is very real. Take cover art for example.
I generally use low-cost cover art. I’ve had 3 books published with original artwork by an artist. Two were in the early days when I was teaching at a college and there was an artist who also taught there. They showed me their painting, and I just had to write a story for that painting, and Desert During Day of the Dead was the result. They liked working with me and drew the Cowboys and Drones cover completely for free. I never really used them again because I couldn’t afford to pay them at all, and felt guilty about it (even though this person didn’t seem to mind they weren’t getting paid).
The third time I had original art was for the novel Orion. I knew the artist personally, and he was paid by the book industry for original artwork. The painting used for Orion was something he had already done, so all I really needed was a title and my name on it in addition to the license to use it for the book. Not much work for him, but I still paid him the fair price for it. I lost so much money on that book. But it was so worth it, because I supported an artist, and dang did it look good.
But as a business, I couldn’t even sustain paying my friends for their art that they weren’t even using, so I turned to cheap cover creation companies that use stock image sites to create their covers. So along comes AI, and now I’m forced to either pay a company to create a cover that while they may be able to guarantee their human won’t use AI tools, but cannot guarantee the stock image site doesn’t use AI, or just generate it myself.
I’m not really “stealing wages” from people I couldn’t afford to hire in the first place. I have a tool that can generate images for me, that I wouldn’t have been able to pay for in the first place. Furthermore, if I wanted to make a moral stance and ensure I’m only paying human artists, it feels like in order to guarantee that no AI was used in the generation of the art, I’d also need to pay for them to live stream themselves drawing my book cover and record it myself (or perhaps know them personally).
AI is coming for your job. I had a person yell at me on the internet recently, telling me that if I think AI is not going to put writers out of work, then I better be prepared for the unemployment line. The joke was on them. I don’t have a writing career! I make about enough money to pay for cover art, editing, and a little ads. Suffice to say, I’m not worried about losing my job as a writer because I don’t have one to begin with.
That aside, there are people economically hurt by AI, consultants, graphic artists, people on Fiverr to name a few (see part two for my thoughts on that). Almost all the tasks I could pay someone on Fiverr or Upwork can be done with a decent AI model now. Most consultant services can be done with an AI too at least ones that are there for imparting expert advice. It’s a little harder to have AI give you an engineering schematic without a human engineer to look it over and tweak it.
AI has its drawbacks, I heard an employer who uses it in their business say, “AI gets us 80% of the way there in a few hours and I need humans to get that other 20%”. He said what changed for him was client expectations, he was used to doing 6-month contract bids, and now has to do them in two weeks. The companies using the technology are making promises to make deliverables earlier, but they still need humans for that other 20%.
And that’s the answer to the AI is coming for your job question. Humans are still needed to bring that other 20%.
AI generates slop. Yes, all true. I even generated slop to use as background images for my books with AI. My crime was not using AI, but not really knowing what I was doing in the graphic design world. A good designer and artist, can look at an image and tell you why it’s wrong, they can then go back to the AI to reshape it. My spouse uses Pinterest and we were talking about all the AI slop and how hard it is to create a system to identify it. With 4 iterations with Gemini, asking my wife each time why it was slop and how to make it better, we eventually created a Pinterest image that if she saw in the wild, wouldn’t be able to tell if it was AI.
The point is AI slop is like writing slop or drawing slop. It always existed before AI. There are folks with aspirations of being a writer who hasn’t done a lot of it, and haven’t really learned how to do it. They publish a first draft at best or maybe a book idea at worst. Same with all the arts. I saw an independent movie on YouTube (okay it was a short), and it was made by teenagers attempting to emulate Quentin Tarantino, doing it poorly, but darnit they are still learning how to make films and if they keep going and keep learning maybe they will be the next Quentin Tarantino.
AI slop is simply this, a person who hasn’t been trained in the artform that they are trying to get AI to produce. If they have any critical self reflection skills (a skill I would argue necessary to be successful in any field), they will start to learn what’s slop and what’s not. One of the first things I wrote in first year college theatre writing class was absolute trash. It was two brothers at a coffee shop saying “Oh my dear brother, what vexes thee?” because that’s how I thought people in plays should sound like. I had to write that, to learn from it to get to where I am now, where most people say my dialogue is some of the best parts of my writing.
Under a skilled person, AI can be used to produce stuff that’s not slop. It needs a human for that other 20%. Eventually, we’ll see a best selling AI generated novel or a hit AI generated movie. Or an image that traveled around the world that is completely AI. There’s already been an AI song that topped a Billboard chart.
I know people complain about their social media feed being filled with slop, but for me personally, I don’t get my entertainment from scrolling. I read publications that I knew will give me quality information. I watch TV shows that interest me. I read books that I enjoy. Slop hasn’t taken over my life because I seek out what I like rather than it being fed to me via the algorithm.
Continue reading the AI Statement series: Next up, Part II: Social Issues →
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