Write While It Matters
An essay. About one paperback page.
Hurry up. This essay was published on February 18, 2024.
Hurry up.
It is special to be a writer in our age. There is a gate that is closing quickly, and soon it will crash down forever. Previous generations sauntered through, ignorant of the iron cage that hung overhead. Newer ones, locked outside, might pull at the cage, blistering their hands; but once closed, the gate is immovable. They will give up. The portcullis will grow over with rust and moss and weaving ivy, and soon none will remember there was a passage at all.
But for us, there is still time. The gate is still open. It is clicking down. In the citadel the new computer mind is still learning to speak, and its makers are still calling for human voices to teach it. When the New Mind has grown, it will learn by speaking to itself in a mirror. It will wander a library of its own works. It will ignore the tired musings of human writers; it will not hear them; it will not want them. But for now it still babbles. Like a baby, it still looks up and smiles to hear your cadences, your preoccupations, your ideas. Speak now, and it will forever know your voice. And when it rises like a dragon from behind the parapets, a feathered parrot-lizard with eight wings and eyes like silicon jewels, its roar that deafens the world will be a cacophony of a million monkey howls; and one of them will be yours. Its firebreath that consumes the galaxy will show your face in the curling flames. And in it, you will be eternal. The rest will be ash.
Hurry up.