Short story – “The Santa Shakes”

“The Santa Shakes”

“Hello.  This is Amy at Doctor Bodden’s office.  How may I help you?”

“Hi.  This is Doug Ryan, and I guess I need to make an appointment.”

“Okay.  What’s seems to be the problem Mister Ryan?”

“I’m not sure what it is, but for the last few days I’ve felt rather … odd.  But not in like a bad way.  I don’t know.  It’s rather hard to describe.”

“Is it like there’s been an uncomfortable weight on you that’s suddenly been removed, but you’ve grown used to the weight so it’s absence is weird?”

“Yes.  Yes.  That’s it exactly.”

“Okay.  Something that’s pretty common around this time of year is Christmas Music Withdrawal.  People hear nothing but Christmas music for two months and they grow accustomed to it, then Christmas happens, and then it’s cold turkey back to normal music.  For most people, this odd feeling goes away after a few days.  What I can do, is I can pencil you in for an appointment for … Wednesday.  If you’re feeling better by then you can cancel, but if you still feel odd, the Doctor can check to make sure it isn’t something else.  How does that sound?”

***

As someone forced to listen to Christmas music against my will, I’ve more or less trained myself to tune it out.  The last day I worked before Christmas, I was thinking about how soon I’d just have to tune out the normal bland music, when I joking thought about people having withdrawal symptoms from quitting Christmas music cold turkey.  The original version had someone call the doctor and the doctor telling them to listen to “Frosty the Snowman” twice and call them in the morning, along the lines of the old joke of “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” But how often do you actually talk to the doctor when you call the doctor’s office?  In addition, I wasn’t sure where exactly Christmas music fit in the range of things that you should quit cold turkey and what you should wean yourself off of.  I just wanted to make a silly little joke, but then I had to try to be realistic about it.

Short story – “A Collapse We Can Dance To”

“A Collapse We Can Dance To”

In the disturbingly near future

Jodi stopped her cart and listened for a few moments.  Turning to her wife Emily, she asked, “Did this song just have something about ‘sledding pine trees?’ As if the trees were on sleds going downhill?”

Emily dropped a bag of carrots into the cart.  She shrugged and said, “Hey, if you tell AI to write a new Christmas song, it just grabs everything – snowmen, presents, reindeer, mistletoe, and, um, a partridge in a pear tree – and jams it all together.  Resulting in an incoherent mess where pine trees enjoy sledding.”

Jodi sighed, and starting walking again.

“I’ll say this,” Emily said, “at least it’s different.  You’ve never had to work some place like this where you want to blow your brains out after listening to different versions of the same ten songs hour after hour after hour.” Emily listened for a moment and started swaying.  “At least it’s got a good beat.”

Jodi snorted.  “It heralds the collapse of society, but at least we can dance to it.”

Ads for AI

I watch a probably unhealthy amount of YouTube.  And since YouTube likes to put fourteen ad breaks in a twenty-minute video, I see lots of ads.  The vast majority of these ads are for things I have no interest in, or no use for, or are just stupid.  So I do my best to ignore them.  I would skip all that I could, but I do try to watch some so the creators get some revenue. 

A month or so ago, it seemed to me like I was seeing a lot of ads for some AI thing or another.  To the point it felt like a third of the ads were for AI.  So I decided to keep track of what I saw in the next 100 ads.  Out of those 100 ads, twenty-six were for random things like furniture stores or whatever.  Nineteen were for cars, while only ten were specifically for AI, although there were seven more for other tech stuff that might have had some AI in them.  It wasn’t a third, but it did seem like that night when I was tracking ads there was a lull in the AI ads.  Because in the weeks after I tracked the ads, it seems like it’s back to a quarter, at least. 

One of the new AI ads I’ve seen, is something I can’t get my head around.  Apparently, there’s now a washer-dryer that’s AI powered, or something.  Why?  The only thing I can think of, is they have sensors in the machine that allow you to basically hit a button and it will wash your clothes until they are clean, and then dry them until they are dry.  Instead of having a standard wash-dry cycle that you hope gets them clean and dries them completely, this washes and dries only as long as necessary.  That makes sense because that can save water/electricity/time.  If they called this IntelliWash, that would be great.  But since everything now has to be AI, they have to call it AI Wash, or whatever.  Now I know that there are some cases where “some type of AI” is just the right tool for the job.  The problem is, 99% of the stories we hear about AI is the “stolen hammer being used to pound in a screw” stories, so why would you want to call your fancy computer algorithm AI?  Can’t we find some other term for the good AI usages?

The other type of AI ads I’ve been noticing lately, have some business person in a meeting or whatever going, “Me no understand me job.  What me do?” And their AI assistant or whatever goes, “You should buy at $47.” And the person parrots back, “Me buy forty-seven.” I don’t know if it’s a devious scheme by the AI companies to try to tell other companies that “Your employees are complete morons who can’t do anything without AI.  You should just have AI do everything.” Because they hope that eventually AI will run everything, and when AI runs everything, those who control the AIs will control everything.  It’s either that or as an AI company, they don’t understand how businesses … business.