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AI War

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While working on the sequel to Nano-Uncertainty, More Uncertainty, the characters have taken me away from my original plot outline. It seems the story is going to be about an AI War. This is a theme that has been the subject of Science Fiction in several forms: The Terminator and Vaughn Heppner‘s A.I. Destroyer. Those are wars between humans and AIs, but what would a war between AIs look like? I started a page AI War to consider this. Your ideas are welcome.

Emotion in AIs

garydurbinwriter2 Comments

The sequel to Nano-Uncertainty, More Uncertainty, looks at whether or not an AI can represent emotions, and, if so, could those representations be used to control the AI’s actions.

While listening to a fascinating discussion on Forum, https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2017/04/11/emotions-are-a-construct-of-the-brain-says-psychologist-lisa-feldman-barrett/ with Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the call-in-ers mentioned to her that he worked in AI and his project was to see if emotions could be used to control an AI.

Guess I’m not the first person to think of this idea, but, hopefully, I’ll be one of the first to put it in a novel.

Here’s a book on the subject: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-2792-6_12. At $439.00 for the book, I think I will wait for the movie.

Writing Dialog

garydurbinwriterLeave a comment

I got some feedback from my writing group on one of my scenes that there was too much dialog without any breaks for summarized dialog or emotional expressions. I did some research – in A Farwell to Arms, Hemingway has half the book in dialog with almost no breaks. But that’s Hemingway.

I wrote another scene with breaks for emotional observation and my editor thought that I should drop the observations. We discussed the issue and finally concluded that the height of the emotions in the dialog should determine whether one takes the reader away from the dialog or tries to summarize in order to break things up.