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> I guess the only ones destined to read it are the AI training algorithms. I'm imagining a lone genius toiling away at a novel and dying in obscurity, with hi
by xhevahir 2y ago
> I guess the only ones destined to read it are the AI training algorithms.
I'm imagining a lone genius toiling away at a novel and dying in obscurity, with his work gaining recognition only after his death, à la Herman Melville, except in this future the writing eventually enters the canon by deeply impressing not human but machine readers.
- troutwine 2y agoMelville was a prominent author, an early sex symbol even, owing to the success and popularity of his novels before Moby Dick. That novel was hugely controversial in its day -- perceived as blasphemous, overwrought -- and it ruined his reputation as an author. Also, he'd spent money he didn't really have during the writing of Moby Dick so that when it flopped he couldn't survive on the famine part of the feast/famine divide. Point being, had Melville continued writing south pacific adventure novels he probably would not be remembered today but might have died a well-off man.
- bowsamic 2y agoThis doesn’t line up with what is written on his Wikipedia page at all, which claims it was his next novel that was more controversial, and he clearly wasn’t that poor because he did a grand tour of Europe and the Mediterranean a few years after
- troutwine 2y agoI can’t speak to the Wikipedia page as I have not read it but the biographical material in my Norton Critical Moby Dick and Delbanco’s Melville line up: Moby Dick was a flop and ruined his reputation in society, Pierre not selling further precipitated the crisis built from choices made while riding a high into The Whale. Melville bought many things with debt: his farm, his rare books, clothes. I don’t find it unimaginable that he paid for the grand tour with debt spending either.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThe machine wept.
- malux85 2y agoI wonder if the machines will be more impressed by elegant, efficient, bug-free code
- bryanrasmussen 2y agogiven what I see they put out when prompted - I suppose not.
- malux85 2y agoExtrapolating future technology from current technology is known to be a flawed method, this has been known for hundreds of years now, maybe longer. For example, in the 1920's they also extrapolated their current tech into the future. It showed people walking around with phonographs strapped to their hips, having just been dropped off by their personal blimps. Predicting the future is hard, but extrapolating the current state forwards is almost always wrong, and shows a huge failure of imagination.