to prepare for Cinco de Mayo,

which seems appropriate in view of this column being a little late in the mad panic to get the graduates across the stage and out into the "real" world, where their work week hours will be halved. It's budget time, there's a $10K typo, meetings galore, research season is ramping up and the Spy's been busy preparing a paper for a literary conference.

The title is

Alternate and Future History Speculative Fiction as Mythopoesis. To review: Mythopoeic thought is a supposed philosophical predecessor of modern thinking, a lens through which events are given mythological contexts, rather than naturalistic/empirical ones--a worldview not framed by physical laws, but energized by assorted deities and spirits.

If that were strictly true, for our chunk of human history, we writers of fiction would be not only even more impecunious (it doesn't pay except for the few superstars like David Weber) but also departed from the trade, for even fiction set in the present or past of our pedestrian world involves myth making, and when it is set in the far future, or an altered present or past, the author must build an entire imaginary world.

Oh, and that hypothesized world must be consistent, down to social, political, military and I daresay, religious ideas, for if the context makes no sense, neither will the plot. Like the science in science fiction, the world is more than context or stage; it becomes a character, essential to the plot. Otherwise, why do it?

Many writers do embrace the empiricist rationality versus mythopoesis dichotomy and attempt to construct a world sanitized of religion. What they apparently don't realize is the there is no logical connection between the explanatory utility of empiricism for scientific investigation OTOH, and philosophical empiricism (also misnamed logical positivism) OTOH. Weber of course is a notable exception, and not too surprisingly to his reader, so is the Spy. The former writes space opera and dystopic fiction set in a far future where star nation coalitions and aliens make war and civilians suffer, and the latter writes alternate history science fiction of the "what if this battle or decision had gone the other way?" or "what if the scientific revolution had happened centuries earlier?" (or both) variety.

Like most mythmakers, our yarns are not spun merely to get audiences to suspend disbelief and be entertained for a small fee, but also to provoke them to think about issues like the environment, overpopulation, the waging of war, sexism, racism, greed, exploitation, toxic politics and government, misuse of power in any context, and numerous other issues. IOW, we're often writing cautionary tales about abuses in some or all of these spheres, and there are frequently echos of character traits we have discerned in real people--past or present. The Spy would find it an impossible task to write a coherent story set in an a-religious world. It could not ring true. His alternate earth peoples are well aware of the Gospel, and at least one character wrestles with its claims in every book.

And speaking of issues,

which he certainly was, for the next conference at which he presents, the topic will be Artificial Intelligence, something the Spy has been declaiming on for five decades. (See last month's column.) One thing he didn't think of back in the 80s (there are a few...chuckle) was that in its infant and toddler stages, as now, AI would turn out to be able to say so little with such great eloquence.

The problem of adequately curated data was always obvious (and is part of his novels), as was the fact that an AI does not know, much less believe or understand anything. But evidently, by scanning millions of books and documents indiscriminately (apparently without respect for copyright) the large language models so far constructed are by (bad) design idiot savants, capable of imitating the best of human writing with loquacious flowery verbosity, while saying little or nothing in the process. Content? There's gotta be some.

There is a maxim about specialization in the intellectually fragmented bygone industrial age that went "Specialists learn more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing." To the point, there is no "I" in "AI", it is all "A". What we have so far are artifacts that "know" nothing about anything, but can express that nothing very prettily.

Yes, they will get better, but the university will adapt first. The days of assigning and marking essays have passed (though the real "writer" is for now still obvious). Instead, we will closely and personally supervise a learning process from topic choice, through research, to outlines, to drafts, to a class presentation (not a paper hand-in). More work for all, but there is no shortcut fake to learning.

The Spy has told well over a hundred semesters of classes "Mathematics is learned through the fingertips". Gotta keep that in the forefront for other aspects of education, which if anything, is certainly not about telling an AUI to do your writing for you--one person of challenged intelligence getting an entirely unintelligent machine to fake intelligence for both. And, the person involved would score a university degree and become a key societal decision maker, mayhap a Prime Minister or President, while lacking any curated and informed engagement with ideas? Perish the thought--or perish the nation for an even greater lack of competent voters and leadership than already.

Apple seemed to have some headwinds

as it coped with declining demand for its phones, this for two reasons. First, them i-phoney thingamajigs is pretty durn good, Zeke. Yes, there are people out there with more money than sense who trade in their iPhones every year for the latest and greatest, but most people hang in there for several cycles. The Spy has owned four pocket devices--a Palm Pilot, and iPhones 4, 6, and 12. His projected next upgrade will happen sometime between 17 and 21 and will probably involve an iPhone, but we'll see when we get here. He's thinking a blood pressure monitor would be a good idea, especially following the next round of elections in Canada and the Excited States. Voting against is easy, but voting for is hard.

By the way, there are many features and/or apps he rarely uses on the Apple watch linked to that phone. Recall that the reason he gave in to pressure and bought it was so it could tell the phone to call an ambulance in case of an emergency. Ah, but nanny watch seems to have been programmed to act on every sudden downward movement (like falling on one's knees in wonder and prayer at God's magnificent creation) as though it were a life-threatening collapse, say being underneath a wind-blown tree trunk, or being chowed down by the neighbourhood black bear. Once, he bent over to pick up a stick on one of the paths through the woods behind his mansion, and the watch called 911. That level of technannyology is a bit much. It would be nice to have blood pressure monitoring though. Just saying...

Second, individuals are not the only ones retreating into tunnel vision and echo chambers now that it is possible to have friends anywhere on the planet though people still prefer to make more enemies. Nations do likewise, using trade sanctions as warfare proxies, engaging in the real thing, snapping at (or up) their neighbours, censoring, imprisoning, and murdering dissidents, thus not only making their countries isolated and inward looking, but also making the world as a whole a far more dangerous place, especially when isolationist, megalomaniac haters of all the "others" gain power, believe they can do anything up to and including murder with impunity and immunity, and are handed the suitcase containing the nuclear trigger buttons.

One aspect of this once again amped-up world (dis)order features trade spats between the U.S. of Anguish and ego-fragile China, with the former ordering telecoms to tear out China-made equipment, and the latter putting revenge restrictions on imports of iPhones, ostensibly to promote home-grown technology. Yes, and c.f. Putin saying (paraphrased) "If you confiscate our assets to fund Ukraine we'll take yours to fund killing even more of them."

But, on the gripping hand, Apple's latest income figures beat analyst's estimates and the stock recovered a good chunk of what it had lost in prior months with worries over sales and pending anti-trust suits. Wall Street often turns on either a fact, rumour, a dime, or nothing more than the wind blowing from the East on a Thursday.

Well, once again,

many things beckon and the ruminescing (every author makes up words, eh?) will be limited for this month and perhaps through summer. Would you believe that the Spy's new textbook publisher needs text-based markup for things like blockquotes and headers? Apparently, its automated typesetting system cannot handle styles. Apart from Latex markup, he hasn't had to do this for decades. Ah, well, the more things change…. Perhaps he will be able to get Scrivener to put them in when it does the compile. But changing all the spelling and punctuation to 'merican will be a chore.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-third year as a high school and university teacher in 2023. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations and participated in developing industry standards at the national and international level. He was co-author of the now defunct Modula-2 programming language R10 dialect project. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 and cancer, where he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth is in preparation) : httpss://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html