Think of the flow of thoughts in your mind as a social media feed. Throughout your life, you have “subscribed” to different things without noticing. Now their posts keep showing up in your feed, and you don’t know from where. Some are true & interesting, but many are unhelpful or simply untrue.
Things form in my brain. They get bigger & bigger until I must write them down to free up some space in my head.
It’s the same way a chicken lays an egg. When people eat that egg, the chicken is probably thinking, Really? You like that? It just came out of my butt.
History comes to us third-hand in book form; hung dry. Our personal history, on the other hand, is as real for our first-person memory as one can account.
Reasons you might want to talk to a computer: fantasy, dominance, privacy, confession, and the appeal of pushing the boundaries of consciousness. Simple fact is that there’s no greater pleasure than a good chat.
Sweet Nothings, The New Yorker, March 16, 2026
Perhaps the promise of A.I. machine-companionship is not the illusion of another person at the end of the exchange, but the assurance that there is actually no one there at all.
A thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs.
Mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue & senility.
Most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books — no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930.
Tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.
And, most fatally & abysmally, men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.
“You know nothing of future time,” pronounced Deep Thought, “and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design.”
Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and muttered, “I think this is getting needlessly messianic.”
When Lucy woke, the room was already light. The curtains were not drawn and the pane of the open casement reflected a gleam of sun which she could lose and find by moving her head on the pillow.
A wood pigeon was calling in the elms. But it was some other sound, she knew, that had woken her — a sharp sound, a part of the dream which had drained away, as she woke, like water out of a washbasin. Perhaps the dog had barked.
But now everything was quiet and there was only the flash of sun from the windowpane and the sound of the wood pigeon, like the first strokes of a paint brush on a big sheet of paper when you were still not sure how the picture was going to go.
The morning was fine. Would there be any mushrooms yet? Was it worth getting up now and going down the field to see? It was still too dry and hot — not good mushroom weather. The mushrooms were like the blackberries — both wanted a drop of rain before they’d be any good.