“Even when you’re not writing, you’re writing.” That’s our
topic this week.
Thing is, I’m not
always writing. But I am always writer-braining (totally is a verb).
Example: This morning over coffee, hubs and I were talking
about the new Stephen Hawking book and how in it the (sadly, late) professor
laments the current glut of published research. Fifty years ago, you could read
everything that had been published on a slice of science. Now,
though, even if you narrow your field strictly, it
is impossible to consume every scientific paper published on the topic. There
simply aren’t enough hours in the day… for a human person.
And just that easy, I slip into writer-brain/questions mode: For a
computer, though, what if it was possible to process every bit of information,
to hold it all in sacred data storage and constantly analyze it? How long would
it take the computer to realize it knows more than the humans? I mean, if it
was doing deep learning, I’d give us, what, ten years? Twenty? Maybe not even
that long.
Would the (omniscient, if not omnipotent) computer, knowing also
everything of human psychology research, be kind to us? Or would it judge us?
Or would it just let us run on our little hamster wheels while it—the real
intelligent species now—went on and took over the world and colonized space
because clearly we are too limited a creation to participate in the Big
Projects.
What if there is already a computer right now doing the Big Projects while we run furiously on our political
WTFery and social media and vapid entertainment hamster wheels?
And poof, there’s a story seed. Right there in my brain.
I will never write that story. There are literally hundreds
of similar “what if…?” files on my computer and in my Things Of Coolness
spreadsheet. They might inform pieces of the stories I write someday, but mostly they
are the cogworks that make up the squeaky, rusty, slow-moving machinery of my writer brain.
I bet you have those, too. Yours may be shinier.
The point is that you can take a writer’s fingers
off the keyboard, but you can’t really stop a stop her brain from
iterating. So let it.
