Okay, okay, I need to let up on the smileys. I know. I should, maybe, I don’t know, use my words? What with the authoring and all? Well, mayyyyyy-be. But. I think. The smiley is a little reminder along the way: I’m a jackass first, and an author second – or third? – which critically, affects/infects all my interactions. Like a Donkey braying at the moon, if you put a thousand together and listen long enough you might hear Shakespeare at one point, but, and this is most important: at the end of the day, you’ve still got a thousand donkeys that can’t do much more than bray at the moon, eat, and shit. Now, Donkey is a far cry farther from Monkey than the words would imply – like we name all creatures: letter-of-the-alphabet-onkey, or something? – but still, I don’t want a thousand of them. This is what I’m saying. Also, the whole idea is interestingly analogous to the current status of artificial intelligence that everyone touts so highly today: we found a way to expedite monkey selection so that Shakespeare appears sooner, and we all look at each other and celebrate, and call that intelligence, but the reality is that better monkey selection ain’t the same as better monkeys. They’re different. And my hunch is that the usefulness of one of those wears out before the other, and the benefit notwithstanding, the cost is something to the tune of a thousand -onkeys. Anyway, think of it like this, AI today is shopping around a bizarre for bags of a thousand animals to do work for us, and the vendors are all shouting about the speed and efficiency of their monkeys, and that, over generations, the monkeys get faster and better at solving the problems they work on; they’re lying. Sure, the results arrive sooner, but the monkeys themselves aren’t any smarter, and ultimately, despite the exceptional moment of Shakespeare, they mainly eat, fuck, and shit, and occasionally throw shit, and that’s about it. We won’t have anything close to intelligence until our approach to AI results in the monkeys asking us why we care so much about Shakespeare. Fuck novelty, perception, and lies, these foundational tropes of society, politics, and progress; when can we handle the truth? In the meantime, I think I’m going to continue to use smileys.