Dickens of a Blog

Current Musical Mood: NMIXX’s Strange Muse.

I assume that most people reading this have some notion of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” If not, there is a Wikipedia link. It’s worth it, finding a copy. One of THE (definite article) stories.

It got a bit of a boost recently because the date in the story is possibly 4 August 2026 (assuming the system is working). Which meant we just survived one of the fiction nuclear winters. Good for us.

You might have less a notion that the title and theme comes from an anti-war poem by Sara Teasdale about how if people wipe themselves out in a war that nature will not care. It’s a bit wrong, the poem, because humans are part of nature and our passing would have some side-effects. I’m going to quote it in its entirety because I think the sentiment is valid. The thing that cares most about humanity’s survival is humanity and our ability to trick ourselves into thinking that’s a lie is madness:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

While the Bradbury story is perhaps mildly prescient about how fast mankind could destroy itself¹, I can’t help but feel that some of the horror people face while reading it is that some aspects of our technology will keep working after we are sand and ash. We will be survived by something we consider wholly subservient to us that no longer cares. Piles of plastic trash if nothing else. Miles and miles of destroyed forests and all those extinct species that will never return to the universe. Look upon us, distant and ancient stories, and tremble in dismay…

…because we are colossally stupid.

WHICH IS ONE HELL OF AN INTRO TO THE MAIN POINT OF THIS POST, sorry. Digression is my middle name. Heh, “Dougression”…

The point was story about me reading a reddit thread about a man being soft catfished² and giving everything away to try and be with a woman who did not exist and how that might constitute a “teaching moment” for the rest of us³. If I am confusing with you, that is ok. It is a confusing time to be alive. There was as Brazilian influencer who did not exist. A man who did exist, according to an article which was not written by a human, gave away his… look, here’s a poem:

Yesterday, on the line
I met a woman who wasn’t mine
She wasn’t mine again today
I guess I’ll give everything away
Just to move some 2000 miles
only to learn she never existed, all the while

I am not linking to the story or the thread because the story was definitely written by AI. Something folks started noticing…

Here’s a legit crazy thought that does not keep me up at night but often makes me go, you know, hmmmm…

…is that a non-zero number of anti-AI reactions are written by AI. AND, I suspect that “non-” portion of non-zero is a number a lot bigger than zero.⁴

While I could go on and on about the fact that no one’s lonely uncle is going to be safe, anymore, it was actually the Bradbury story I thought about first.

That if somehow people just ceased to be in a way that did not wreck the infrastructure (aliens, I assume, or mutant bigfoot attacks) that there would be at least a time where a bunch bots just responded to bots and wrote articles for bots and music for bots. Think of the millions of thumbs up and posts on Youtube going “2091, anyone?” with no one left to read them.

If only some author had written about the danger of giving over our creative and emotional processes to unfeeling things and how it would leave the earth a barren place, eh?

Just to be fair, Body Snatchers and its OG movie are all about the importance of feeling and creativity and messy emotions and how being replaced by an “rationally arguably correct” but callous way of living will leave the earth a barren place… and a lot of folks have assuming it was an attack on Communists.

We don’t exactly need AI bots to come up with terrible takes.

The important take away is that our stuff is going to survive us. Especially the plastic bits. Sorry, Ozymandias.

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1. It does seem a bit off that a nuclear blast close enough to eradicate a family in a flash would leave their edifice to capitalism and modern convenience standing. Sounds like engineers needed to use that blast-proof tech to protect kids and not just sell expensive smart-houses, eh? ↩︎
2. “Chatfished” was my clever neologism I was going to use but other people have used it so I have decided it is dumb and childish. Follow-ups included “cAItfished” but frankly “soft catfishing” allowed me to work in the Bradbury story. ↩︎
3. We are going to leave aside the fact that the non-existent woman almost definitely didn’t invite him to do it, according to the badly written article, meaning the man just…stalked someone who did not exist. Maybe some Brazilian paper has a better version of the story but it is frankly secondary. ↩︎
4. Just look at all the hype around the attack on the datacenters and people claiming it shifted the arguments online and such. That story feels immensely and quickly overblown. That it helps to dehumanize people who disagree with us online was a bonus feature. ↩︎