PROMPT: Ideal Home

Daily writing prompt
What does your ideal home look like?

Big enough to live in it; small enough not to live for it.

Preferably, it teleports on a regular basis, so I don’t have to — you know— live in one place for the rest of my life.

PROMPT: Feeling

Daily writing prompt
How are you feeling right now?

Post-breakfast satiety with a side of caffeine rush.

PROMPT: Habit

Daily writing prompt
What daily habit do you do that improves your quality of life?

I poop. Surely, I would have exploded in my youth if I hadn’t developed the habit. I feel my quality of life as a human must be better than the quality of life of gut bacteria in wall-spattered fecal matter. At least I have the leisure and capacity to contemplate such things.

PROMPT: Searched for Online

Daily writing prompt
What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

I ask AI what kind of economic system can work when machines / AI do virtually all productive tasks better than humans — such that humans can no longer sell their labor for money to buy goods and other services. (i.e. the backbone of economies as we’ve known them.) I ask because it’s an extremely important question whose answer is completely without precedent. Those who say it’ll be like a new, bigger, better Industrial Revolution are full of shit. It was not hard to imagine the work domain left to humans during the Industrial Revolution- unless you were a proper Luddite. When we hit the aforementioned inflection point, however distant it may or may not be, it will be an entirely different matter.

It’s a little like asking a real estate developer what will happen to you and your neighbors when they tear down your subdivision to build a golf course, but the AI is a little less defensive. When the AI is equally defensive, we’ll know we’re screwed.

PROMPT: TV Shows

Daily writing prompt
What TV shows did you watch as a kid?

Andy Griffith Show, Carol Burnett Show, Dick Van Dyke Show… wow, they were not creative with names in those days.

PROMPT: Favorite Time

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite time of day?

When all is quiet and harmonious, and one anticipates good things are to come.

PROMPT: Recipe

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite recipe?

Flour, water, salt, and yeast. The epitome of simplicity.

PROMPT: Excited

Daily writing prompt
Tell us about the last thing you got excited about.

Being able to read Chinese, even if is dumbed-down stories for beginners and I still have to look words up every few sentences. But it feels like I’ve stumbled upon a door to a whole new universe.

PROMPT: Cities

Daily writing prompt
How would you design the city of the future?

I suspect cities are on the way to becoming passé. They worked great for an economy built around humans exchanging time and effort for a salary, but in an economy in which machines do virtually all productive tasks better, faster, and more efficiently than humans, the benefits seem less clear.

Plus, there’s a lot of discussion of an epidemic of loneliness, and so it seems — as a basic organizational structure — cities (admittedly ironically) don’t serve humanity well. People are adapted for families and tribes — more close-knit communities.

Furthermore, Asia is already beginning to see the problem of downward scalability of cities, as many cities shrink less elegantly than they grew. Birth rates are declining everywhere as humanity reaches its upper limit for this planet.

Maybe the future is artist colonies.