Authors Electric

It's getting so there's no future in futurism. The future nips at our heels faster than we can predict it. Take the latest chatter about ChatGPT. Professors say it's the end of the world. Standard fare for Scici writers - warning of misuse, while speculating on our replacement by the instant proliferation of this AI phenomenon.  ChatGPT explains itself succinctly as any human: "ChatGPT is a large language model developed by  OpenAI  that can be used for natural language processing tasks such as text generation and language translation. It is based on the GPT-3.5 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3.5) model, which is one of the largest and most advanced language models currently available. All this is free of charge, mind you. (Or course, nothing is truly "free" in tech world.) Free means getting billions of users to provide content for free - content in quality and quantity promising to be worth trillions of dollars in return. Data is to Internet enterpr...

I used to think of writing as a lonely pursuit. Were it a sport it would be like golf - better yet, like fly fishing in high country. Lately, however, I've realized, not so much. My author-in-the-attic time notwithstanding, I find that I must depend on the kindness of friends and colleagues - even strangers - in the process of bringing my work to fruition, not to mention contract copy editors and designers. I'm talking only about solo works. I'm not counting staff-produced works - magazines, journals, and so forth, or even blogs. Neither am I counting High Treason - the cold war biography I coauthored with the late, CIA-KGB double agent Vladimir Sakharov in the 1980s. Nor either of my other coauthored books that were outright collaborations. I try my best to thank all of the above on in my acknowledgements - including those who generously provided forewords and blurbs, but the list falls short. My inamorata, Eleanor , vets all of my final drafts. Besides being a no...