distorted image of girl's face

A few weeks ago, I got a private message from someone I didn’t recognize on Discord. They’re a member of the Western Mass Writer’s Guild Discord server. I don’t normally chat with random people on the Internet but I thought I’d see if they were a local writer or what. We exchanged a few messages. They said they were an artist and asked if I wanted to look at their portfolio. They had a dozen or more pieces of digital art where you could see both the original line drawings and the finished, full-color artworks.

I’m not sure why they messaged me. I think they may have seen the posts about starting Elegant Lich and hoped that maybe we would be in the market to purchase artwork. They never really said.

We exchanged a few dozen messages during the following weeks. I made it clear early on that I wasn’t in the market to purchase artwork. But, during the conversation, I also was trying to suss out if they were a human being or a bot.

I asked how they were. “Sad” because they didn’t have any commissions. I asked what they were going, “Nothing much. Trying to get some work.” I made a point of sharing public aspects of my life: the same things I was posting to social media: hanging out with Tanuki, getting a flat tire fixed, getting vaccinated, etc. They said nothing to suggest they had any kind of human life.

Finally, I admitted that I was trying to tell if they were a human being. They haven’t contacted me since.

This was all before SFWA ran their panel discussion today: I Swear I’m Not a Robot — How Publishers Are Handling the Pressure to Confirm Human Authorship. It was very helpful and I took careful notes. The panel included a number of editors that are struggling with the problem of identifying AI-generated manuscripts.

They pointed out that the problem is not just manuscripts. The entire ecosystem is under attack. It includes reviews and artwork and correspondence. “In every space there might be writing, people are using these tools to conduct scams” — M.L. Clark.

All of the editors reported a significant amount of trauma over the experience of having accepted, nearly published, or published AI generated manuscripts — and only learning they’d been scammed through reports from readers. It’s a struggle to extend and maintain trust — especially with new authors who most need to find a receptive, supportive community. What is the community’s role? What is the responsibility of the staff? Where does the buck stop? What do we do? “Dealing with not being able to know is the challenge” — Michael J. Deluca.

There is a substantial debate about the potential role of using automated tools to identify AI-generated manuscripts. Some of the tools seem quite good right now. But it’s an arms race between the AIs and the tools. When do you use them? As a first line of defense, to protect your slush readers? Do you really trust the machine to make these decisions? There’s not a clear answer.

One editor said they might engage the author in a series of questions about their writing process, e.g. “Why did you use this PoV?” I thought, “Oh, no. I’m fucked.” I don’t know why I write the way I do. I’ve never taken any writing classes so I don’t even have the language to talk about why I write the way I do. But other people were careful to point out that the burden of proving they were human should not be on the author but on the editor. Still, retaining artifacts of the writing process, like outlines, rough drafts, revision histories, could all be useful to help demonstrate human authorship.

The moderator commented that Yog’s Law should still hold: Authors should certainly not have to pay to prove that they’re human.

There were a few encouraging points. First, Gen-AI is not good at generating long manuscripts. It can write good flash fiction but, the longer the manuscript, the less likely the AI is to be able to develop and maintain a complex narrative. Many of the people using AI are fundamentally lazy: simple checks can catch many of them. Also, current models are being funded by venture capital. As the true costs shift to the users, it may well not be economically viable to generate AI for the meagre pittance that short fiction writers earn, and discourage scammers from pursuing the “market.”

In the end, the recommendations were for editors to educate themselves, talk to each other, and build stronger networks of human connection. All good recommendations.

a fawn boxer dog

People who follow me on social media are already familiar with my characters Totemo Isogashii and Lambda. Lambda, of course, is a NeoBoxer.

I write about them pretty often. I’ve just finished a new novelette that features them and, since I’ve been thinking about them a lot, I thought I might offer a little background for fans.

Note: The picture is of my son’s boxer dog Tanuki. For some reason, the description of Lamba is nearly identical.

Three years ago, when I was writing Better Angels: Tour de Force, I wanted to write a story about Tau that was inspired by Lady and the Tramp, I called it The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau. Tau has learned that a girl NeoBoxer, Lambda, has come to the Truck Stop, but he’s depressed because she says she’s too busy to go on a date. The Better Angels and their allies wage a campaign to keep her partner, Totemo Isogashii, occupied for long enough for Tau to put the moves on Lambda. It’s the sort of fluff that led me to call the Better Angels stories fluffy military space opera.

In the years since I wrote that silly little story about Totemo Isogashii and Lambda, I’ve written dozens — maybe a hundred — little bits of microfiction about them. Here’s one example:

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Totemo said. She and Lambda were laying on the floor in a sunbeam.
Lamba lay on her back with her muppies splayed out. She wuffed, softly.
“I can’t relax,” Totemo said. “I’ve got so much to do and, instead, I’m just laying around here.”
Lambda had persuaded Totemo to sign up for a day-long cat-guided* rest day. Their facilitator was Tama, a fluffy, white cat with blue eyes.
After going out at dawn to hunt voles, they had spent hours just laying in the sun, moving periodically as the light moved across the floor.
Someone rang a triangle in the other room. Tama sprang to her feet and ran toward the sound.
“I hope it’s lunch!” Totemo said.
They arrived in the kitchen where three bowls were set on the floor. Tama was already eating out of one. Lambda took the second.
Totemo considered her options.

*Note: this was inspired by seeing an ad for a “cat-guided field trip” where people would pay money to go follow a cat around in the forest. Really.

Totemo and Lambda also show up in my novelette Bearly Believable, which is scheduled to appear in Hexfiled this month. As I’ve learned more about the characters, I decided to finally write the story of how they meet. It’s set, appropriately enough, on the planet Holufinia, the origin world of NeoBoxers.

I originally wrote about NeoBoxers in the same time frame as some of my very earliest SFF writing, more than twenty years ago. The first working title was “Happiness is a Warm Puppy.” As I was writing Better Angels, I pulled out that old manuscript and reworked it as a Truck Stop story. I added some stuff and cut a lot of stuff, and retitled it Hope is a Cloned Puppy. From that manuscript, here is my earliest description of a NeoBoxer:

Tawny, with a black face, Beta was the NeoBoxer that had been provided to assist the crew. Beta was a dog, but not just any dog. NeoBoxers were the product of hundreds of years of selective breeding and not a small amount of genetic engineering. Created to lend their keen noses and stout hearts to any adventure, they also sought to forge strong bonds of loyalty among the crew. Beta gamboled among the crew members nudging them with his muzzle to encourage bonding.

Pascal admired his ability to work with both sides of the crew and his single-minded focus when he found a problem that was within his range of capacities. Beta could sense that there was division in the crew and he worked tirelessly to bring both sides together into a single pack with a common purpose.

The setting, Holufinia, is a distant world in the galaxy that got cut off after a disastrous civil war took down their advanced technology and the wormhole that connected them with galactic civilization. In Hope is a Cloned Puppy, we learn how the planet gets reconnected to the larger galactic civilization, we’re introduced to NeoBoxers, and we learn the origin of Tau, the NeoBoxer that lives on the Truck Stop.

I offered the manuscript as a story for the Truck Stop. But, after Better Angels came out, the publisher seemed to abandon the Truck Stop universe. I don’t believe any story has come out since. He never explained to me why. I was disappointed because I thought the shared universe idea was fun and wrote several other stories for it, including at least three more Better Angels stories.

The working title of my new story was “Totemo and Lambda Save the World.” The finished title is You Can’t Change Just One Thing. I would classify the story as Hopepunk. The book is primarily about the ecology of Holufinia. The title is a riff on Garrett Hardin’s Iron Law of Ecology, “You can never do just one thing.” Anything you do in an ecosystem touches everything else. We also learn how Totemo and Lambda meet, and the ways that meeting changes Totemo’s life.

I really love the characters. Totemo is an earnest, take-charge scientist. She’s abrasive and hard-driving, always working harder and smarter than anyone else. Lambda is the one with a sense of humor. She’s equally smart and capable, but she is always looking out for her human partner and not above using subterfuge to get her to take better care of herself and attend to her own needs. And she’s happy to have a little fun while doing it.

I keep coming back to NeoBoxers. When my oldest son was in first grade, he had an assignment to write every day. And after he’d written something, he was allowed to illustrate it with a picture. The first day, he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY!” and provided an illustration of a boxer dog wearing a cape. The next day he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY AGAIN!” and drew a similar picture. He did the same for every day that followed. Like father like son, I guess.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with the story and will shortly start submitting it for publication. I’m hopeful it will find a home soon and I will be able to share it with you.

chart showing job losses and gains in part due to AI

It’s frustrating how often articles get posted at the NYT that engage in specious, uncritical thinking — especially when it’s in the service of the rich and wealthy. Today’s example is Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I. (gift link) by Steven Rattner. His argument is that we need AI, not just because it is innovation, but because it will drive innovation. I call shenanigans.

He’s primarily focused on growth. He links productivity growth with higher standards of living. Of course, that hasn’t been true since Reagan. In the 1980s, productivity growth has only gone to enrich the very wealthiest and wages have been stagnant. He can fudge his argument by selectively showing periods on his charts.

I really loved the graph cited above. Yes! All of those “Data entry keyers” should clearly get jobs as “Data Scientists”. Problem solved!

Where he really lost me (if he ever “had me”) was when he started talking about innovation. He describes how [AI] “saved me and my colleague, Will McGrew, many hours of prowling the internet to research this essay. That left us with time to do other tasks.” First, the only reason it could save you that much time is because the oligarchs wrecked Internet search to force people to use their stochastic parrot. It was way easier to find things on the Internet before they broke it. Second, if you outsource your thinking to a robot, then you undermine the most important path to innovation.

Innovation is frequently taking ideas from one domain and leveraging them in another. People can do this when they develop expertise in multiple domains. When you outsource your thinking to a robot, you lose most or all of the ability to do that. You can, perhaps, more deeply specialize in your own domain. But without multidisciplinary thinking, you’re less likely to have the transformational insights that drive true innovation.

Most laughably, was his admission that “Thus far, the gains from artificial intelligence have accrued not to workers, but to investors who have reaped soaring profits from the explosive increase in the value of companies in the A.I. industry.” But there are lots of ways to fix that, he assures us. Please. The only way that’s getting fixed is if people organize and fight back. Like they’re doing. Maybe you could help, dude, rather than whining that we need to let the corporations help us grow and innovate.

Where we may be in agreement is in the need for additional regulation. We need to shut down the A.I. companies and let the research be done in public laboratories until it’s demonstrated to be safe and effective to be used. We wouldn’t let pharmaceutical companies release their beta cancer treatments to the public. The AI companies should not be releasing these untested systems to see what havoc they can wreak on the public until we have safeguards in place, and the assurance that they’re safe and effective.

AI may, someday, be shown to be safe and effective. But we should fight these companies trying to jam it down our throats as if our lives depended on it. Because they just might.

cannon bone of an ungulate

Chronic pain sucks. When pain is constant and inescapable, it preys on your mind, makes it hard to do anything, and contributes to depression. I’ve only had a couple of brushes with chronic pain, but they’ve been no fun.

My first serious experience with chronic pain was after I returned from a trip and strained a rotator cuff in my shoulder. I think it was from pulling a rolling suitcase over rough pavement during a week in Brazil and a weekend in New York City. It hurt all the time: no matter what I did it hurt. I found myself straining the shoulder worse trying to find a position where it didn’t hurt, which only made it hurt more. I got a shot of cortisone, which was totally ineffective (steroids don’t seem to have much effect on me). But I also got a prescription for Vicodin.

The Vicodin was amazing. About twenty minutes after I took it, the pain went away. The euphoria of not being in pain almost made me giddy, but I seemed otherwise completely unaffected and went into work every day like usual. After about six weeks, the shoulder had healed and I quit taking the Vicodin. Then I discovered that I had accomplished essentially nothing in the intervening six weeks. I was “working”, but not actually getting my work done.

Nine years ago, I fell on the ice and injured my knee. It didn’t seem bad enough to require medical attention at the time, but it was never really the same after. I adjusted by taking stairs one a time, especially going down. And I now generally use a “mobility aid” — a walking stick that gives me some additional stability.

Most of the time, it’s OK, but every so often, it acts up. It’s been acting up for the past week or two. It aches and is painful at random times. It makes it hard to sleep. Ibuprofen has generally been enough, but I don’t like taking it if I don’t have to.

There may be some kind of trigger, but thus far I’ve been unable to identify what it specifically is. I’m paying attention to how I stand up and do various ordinary activities. I’ve discovered that coping strategies like this can be very helpful to avoid exacerbating problems. I used to kind of throw myself out of bed in the morning but, when I reached a certain age, I discovered that this was a great way to strain my back. So now I carefully swing my feet over the side of the bed and push myself up sideways. The same with getting out of the car or standing up from a chair.

I remember Philip used to joke that when you hit 30, it was like the warranty ran out. But at 60, you start to run up against the service life of your body’s components. But, like Indiana Jones said, “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.”

interior of old fort

I was interested in the Ken Burns’ series about the American Revolution, but I have a hard time making myself watch things on television, so I was pleased when I saw the companion volume in the library. As with The Raider, it reminded me of familiar events, but provided a lot of additional perspectives which give me a more nuanced understanding of the events. And, once again, I’m baring my soul a bit here to describe my own naivete because my education in history was so meagre.

I first learned about the American Revolution when I was in public school in southwest Michigan. None of the locations were places I had ever visited or known about, which made them hard to picture or bring into any kind of alignment with each other. But subsequently I moved to Massachusetts and visited many of the other locations — even if only driving through on the highway — which now gives me a lot more insight into their relative location and geography. Of course, I’ve also spent many months on a Caribbean island which — though not a direct player in the American Revolution, was fundamental to the forces that were driving the dynamic of the revolution.

The book has chapters to the major episodes of the American Revolution. The stage is set and then the familiar events are described, often by using short vignettes that highlight particular people — all kinds of people — so you see the war not from some top-down perspective, but through the eyes of individuals: Soldiers, to be sure, but also women, enslaved people, indigenous people, and immigrants. Certainly there is a bias toward the wealthy, as they were the most likely to have left behind a journal or record of their experiences. But there is a clear striving for diverse viewpoints that enriches the storytelling.

In between the chapters are a series of essays that offer supplementary analysis that provides different ways for thinking about the events. One by Stephen Conway, argues that Americans tend to think of the American Revolution as fundamentally about America, whereas to the British, it was but one element out of a complex set of imperial events — and was driven less by events in America itself than changes that Britain was making to integrate their colonial empire around the world.

One thing I had never really understood about slavery was the extent to which it was the foundation upon which almost all of the really large fortunes were made in that time. The super wealthy people that everyone talked about when I was young were the robber barons (e.g. Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.) who had made their fortunes after slavery. But in the time of the American Revolution, the Caribbean islands produced the truly outsized fortunes for the nations that colonized them. The entire war involved people trying to thread the needle between pursuing “freedom” while keeping people enslaved. The book does a good job of telling that story from multiple perspectives.

The Revolutionary War was also a civil war that divided families and neighbors. This was an aspect of the war that was largely glossed over in my previous education.There were a lot of loyalists who aligned with the British forces and fought against independency. The book has an essay and follows the story of several people who tell the loyalist side of the story. In the long run, things did not turn out well for most of them.

Unlike his series about the Civil War, there were no photographs to draw from to help visualize the scenes. The book uses historical paintings, though most of them were made long after the war and were designed to represent a particular points of view rather than reflect any historical accuracy. Of course, as Werner Herzog has described about the Crimean War, even documentary photographs were often staged for effect.

The book also has historical maps showing the disposition of forces in the various battles. These I found to be more of a curiosity, rather than anything useful as a visual guide. They were often not in English or had the directions reversed, and there was no consistency to how the units were represented. I would have appreciated having interpretive maps of the battles drawn using a consistent style to show how the battles occurred. But maybe I’m just a weirdo.

Reading a heavy coffee-table book was inconvenient. But still recommended. A good read.

an istvan bierfaristo mug

The Board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is organizing a series of kaffeeklatsches this fall as outreach to the membership to discuss this year’s Nebula Awards and the new Recommended Reading List. We had our first last night and it went great.

Day Al-Mohamed, one of our newest Board Members, had started offering “office hours” for members to stop by with questions. But in our previous Board Meetings, she had commented that she wasn’t getting much attendance.

Upon reflection, I wondered if maybe “office hours” didn’t sound inviting enough and that maybe we could attract more interest by calling it a kaffeeklatsch and having two Board Members attend so that — even if no other members came, at least she wouldn’t have to sit there alone. She — and the rest of the Board — expressed enthusiasm.

I’m not sure I’d heard the word “kaffeeklatsch” before joining the science fiction community. The word refers to gossip over coffee. In the SFF community, a kaffeeklatsch is an small gathering typically centered around a particular author or personality where people can attend to engage in informal conversation. It’s more structured than simply meeting in a bar or hotel lobby and, as I understand it, was chosen as a term to avoid having the connotation of being associated with alcohol. SFWA also runs an annual silent auction where people can bid to participate in a kaffeeklatsch with prominent authors.

I’ve attended a few kaffeeklatsches, including a particularly memorable one with Neil Clarke. I have to admit that, personally, as an attendee, I tend to like structured events more than unstructured. I always worry about what will happen if nobody attends. Or — even worse — if almost nobody attends. What if I’m there by myself and have to carry on a whole conversation with someone! It’s enough to make me resort to Reverse Imposter Syndrome!

When I first attended my first Worldcon in Chicago, I was given the opportunity to do a “table talk” — that was effectively a kaffeeklatsch. Being new, I signed up for pretty much everything. When the time came, I found my table, among a bunch of others where people were having lively conversations. But nobody came to mine. Eventually, a friend walking by took pity. I didn’t make that mistake again.

We had our first one last night. I had a great time. Day and I were joined by M.L. Clark (the SFWA Communications & Marketing Coordinator) who had set up all the background resources for us, produced a great publicity piece, and came to the first one to make sure everything worked. There were a couple of minor bumps getting everything set up and running. But we got two members to stop by and we all had a nice discussion about SFWA and writing and publishing.

The next several kaffeeklatsches are already posted. We need to get the topics updated. And finish getting Board Members signed up and RSVPed. I also want to make a couple more adjustments to the back end to make it easier for me to support them, but I think we’ll be ready in plenty of time for the next one. I think these can be a great step toward having the board engage more directly with the membership.

a house near fredricksburg

I have been looking for books to help improve my background in literature and was excited to find The Emerson Circle that talks about important early-American writers who surrounded Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although this book dwelt a bit longer on their personal histories and less on their writing, it was still a useful introduction.

A number of years ago, an Esperanto friend from Chile and his wife were visiting the Boston area. I drove in to spend a day with them and do a little sightseeing. I thought my friend, who is a bibliophile, might appreciate visiting Walden Pond and the Thoreau museum. I didn’t know much about it, but I had seen signs driving past Concord.

When we visited, we also drove to the Old North Bridge to see some of the Revolutionary War sights. I was surprised to see signs for Emerson’s house. And Louisa May Alcott’s house. I was completely unaware of the connections among these authors.

I did know a bit about Thoreau. My father had read his work and I had at least a passing familiarity with it. But I didn’t know anything about the museum. Or his life. Or the other people in Emerson’s circle. Some, like Nathanial Hawthorne, I was aware of (We read The Scarlet Letter in high school). Others, like Margaret Fuller, I was wholly ignorant of.

After my visit to the museum, I read some of Thoreau’s writing and wrote about it in my blog. I think that post still stands up pretty well, thirteen years later.

I was a bit disappointed with the first half of Nichols’ book. Partly, I think it assumed the reader would know more about the authors than I did. It also had a tendency to dwell on the minutiae of their lives: How many times this child was struck on the palm with a ferule. Which house they lived in this year or that. I found a lot of that pretty tedious.

I was looking for the ideas in their writing and how those ideas were passed back and forth. But the book seemed to expect that of course the reader would have read all their works beforehand. Since I had not, I needed to read between the lines quite a bit until I had picked up enough background knowledge to begin to fill in the gaps.

The second half of the book was closer to what I was looking for. There was more discussion of how the writers were responding to the important issues of the day: suffrage, abolition, the Civil War, etc. And it contrasted the types of writing that the different authors were publishing on the issues.

The book also got me to reflect on the various author’s communities I belong to. This fall, I’m hoping to spend more time reading the works nominated for the Nebula Awards which will help me gain a better understanding of the people in my community. Now that I’m retired, I finally have more time and energy to devote to reading. And I’ll also look for more books like The Emerson Circle to provide me with introductions to other important groups of historical authors.

pepper box

I rarely read biographies, but this book used the life of Evans Carlson to provide a vast amount of context to the story of China and the war in the Pacific. It truly expanded my perspective on a topic that I might have said I was already familiar with, but showed me how little I really knew.

The full title is The Raider: The untold story of a renegade marine and the birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II. That’s quite a mouthful. It was written by a colleague at UMass Amherst.

When I was an elementary or middle school student, I got excited about World War II fighter planes. My father, whose kneejerk response to anything was to buy a book, bought me several books about fighter planes. One of them was The Flying Tigers. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out which book it might have been, but it turns out there have been a lot of books about the Flying Tigers and search engines are worthless now.

The Flying Tigers were a squadron of American pilots recruited to fly as volunteers in support of China prior to start of World War II. The vision it presented was a rather hagiographic portrayal of Claire Chenault and the pilots he taught to use the strengths of the P-40 to be able to beat the, lighter and more maneuverable, Japanese Zero. It was an exciting book for a young man and I’m sure I read it several times.

What it didn’t really talk about at all were the complexities of China or what the U.S. interests were. The Chinese, when they were mentioned at all, were described primarily as faceless hordes of people who were able to use manpower to replace mechanized work, repairing runways or building the Burma Road. Chiang Kai-shek and his wife featured prominently as elegant and graceful leaders. The ongoing civil war, the communist movement, and Western imperialism were all elided — or perhaps just minimized. As a boy, I was there for the exciting stuff.

The Flying Tigers don’t come up in this book at all. But I provide the above to explain some of the limitations of my understanding before reading it and how it dovetailed with what I already knew.

Evans Fordyce Carlson was the son of an itinerant pastor in New England. He ran away at a young age, tried working at various things, and eventually joined the Army. He served in World War I, primarily in an administrative capacity. He left the armed forces and was unhappy. He eventually decided to rejoin, but they wouldn’t restore him to the rank he had earned, so he decided to just start over in the Marine Corps. The theme of just going back and starting over recurs several times throughout his life.

In part, Carlson rejoined because he wanted to go to China. It’s not clear where the idea of going to China came from, but eventually he got his chance. He remade himself again in China, becoming an intelligence officer and began to educate himself about China and the competing forces that were trying to assert control.

The book does a great job of leading the reader through the various epiphanies he had as came to understand his own country’s role in creating and perpetuating the inequities in China. Carlson idealized Emerson and carried a book of his essays with him that he studied and underlined passages in. He believed in small-d “democracy” and the role of ordinary people in enacting it. As he came to know the leaders of communists, in particular Zhu De, he was persuaded that they were the ones most committed to democracy. He also found their approach to guerilla warfare could be transformative. It broke down the hierarchies among soldiers, emphasized educating individuals to understand the nature of the conflict they were in and why they were fighting. It also empowered them to be able to act on their own initiative in the absence of orders.

Back in the United States, Carlson had the opportunity to meet and form a personal connection with FDR. This ultimately led to him being given license to create a regiment of soldiers — “The Raiders” the book is named after — that were modeled on his approach to guerilla warfare. It was Carlson who coined the term “gung ho” which originally meant just “working together,” but later grew to have the popular meaning it has today. His soldiers distinguished themselves in several engagements in the Pacific island-hopping campaign. Eventually, however, the unconventional nature of the force became too much for the Marine Corps hierarchy to tolerate. He was sidelined and the force brought back into alignment with traditional Marine-Corps doctrine.

The end of the book deals with how thoroughly Carlson was whitewashed out of history. His association with the communists was used to discredit his ideas during the Red Scare. As the book says, nothing is named after him and there are no monuments to him, other than his tombstone at Arlington. In 2014, 70 years after the original Raiders were disbanded, the Marine Corps renamed their special forces unit The Raiders to establish an historical link between the current unit and the first.

This only scratches the surface of what’s here. There’s a lot more about the man, his personal life, and the other fascinating figures he came into contact with during his adventures. But, as I said initially, I don’t usually take much interest in biographies. The context of this one, however, made it well worth my time.

a foo dog

I read Cory Doctorow’s newsletter Pluralistic regularly and this book was essentially an expanded version of a number of his columns. But I found several points insightful.

Recently I cited Cory when I wrote about not being able to speak centaur. He unpacks his “centaur/reverse centaur” model and provides an explanation of what “AI” really is and how we’ve gotten here. This is all stuff I’m already pretty familiar with.

I think his principal argument comes up after he talks about copyright. Basically, he points out that copyright is not going to protect individual artists for several reasons. First, the benefits of copyright have been almost entirely captured by the big publishers and media companies: they can wield it to extract profits from the public, but they pass a smaller and smaller fraction back to the creative workers that created the copyrighted works. And second, because the things that AI companies are doing (when they aren’t stealing works) would not be banned by copyright — or, if they were, it would make many other ordinary activities illegal.

His key insight is that creative workers need to recognize that they are “workers” and, like other workers, need to organize to have enough power to stand up against the big media companies. As a long-time union activist this is a story that is near-and-dear to my heart. I have frequently seen people who look for rules or laws to protect them (like minimum wage, for example) rather than organizing with their co-workers to demand the power to extract concessions from employers directly. He points out that the Taft Hartley Act, that cleverly and malevolently forbid sectoral bargaining, resulted in the high water mark for labor activism in the 1940s, and has allowed the oligarchs to slowly claw back most of what they lost to labor after the gilded age. I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time.

He also talks a bit about what happens after the bubble collapses. Philip Brewer has written a thoughtful essay about that and Cory’s perspective is largely aligned in terms of the big picture. But he goes on to point out all of the cool stuff that small, open-source models can do to make us all centaurs. He cites some examples he’s using himself and points out a bunch of other possibilities that small-scale AI could offer to enable creative workers to do their creative work better.

It’s a thoughtful and insightful book that pulls together a number of Cory’s ideas into a coherent and organized form. It’s worth reading.

people dancing

On the first day of August, 1996, I arrived in Amherst and undertook my new position as Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center for the Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Now, on the last day of August, 2026, I am concluding my career in academia.

I had thought I had performed my last professional duty on July 21. That was the last scheduled meeting of the Rules Committee. But a couple of weeks ago, the Secretary floated three dates for the Rules Committee to meet to discuss an issue before the new semester. Two of the proposed dates were in September, but he also proposed August 31 — my last date of employment. And that was the date they chose. It was fun to see my colleagues one last time.

The Faculty Senate and Union are discussing coordinated action. Often, their spheres of responsibility do not intersect, but current actions of the administration are impinging on both. It gave me an opportunity to offer a historical perspective. My perception has been that faculty and departments have been substantially weakened over the time of my career. Of course, it started much earlier: I was hired as part of the wholesale replacement of tenure-system faculty with non-tenure-system faculty that substantially weakened the power and independence of the faculty. It actually started later here than many other places. I told them about the Lazare Commission in 2001 that evaluated the needs of the campus while choosing a new chancellor. In 2011, I looked back on the outcome of the Commission. I had believed they had recognized the value of the faculty as a unique strength — but instead they chose to invest in anything and everything else in order to bring down the quality of the faculty to the same level as all of the other parameters at the University. Similarly, when a subsequent Chancellor tried to develop a new budget model using Responsibility Centered Management (RCM), the effort largely failed — but it did have the effect of siphoning off most of the budgets from Departments and giving them to the Colleges under the control of the deans. Departments are much weaker now than when I joined the Faculty. I wished my colleagues well as they undertake to continue the struggle.

For my part, I began my career with the goal of empowering students to take control of their own educations. I wanted them to come to see every class they took — not just mine — as an invitation to immerse themselves in some new area of study and work to satisfy themselves, rather than slavishly try to merely do what was “required.” This was the actual learning goal of every class I taught and every assignment in my teaching. Few students came in with that perspective. Some were ready to learn it. Others realized it during my teaching. Some did not. But I felt it was the right goal to strive for and was always overjoyed to see the light bulb go on.

I wrapped up one other duty yesterday: a student who took my writing class last spring requested a letter of recommendation. I will probably get a few more of these over the next year. But they will tail off pretty quickly now that I’m no longer teaching. It was always fun when students let you know they were accepted into a new program. But I won’t miss writing the letters.

Someone asked if I was doing anything to celebrate. I actually spent most of the day taking my mother in for a medical procedure. Going through the procedure myself would have been easier than watching her go through it. But afterwards she requested a scoop of ice cream, so I got one too. That’s as much celebration as I need.

And tomorrow, I begin my new life.