Working for peanuts is all very fine

"While Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

That's what Oscar Wilde had to say in "The Soul of Man under Socialism". I was reminded of it because of the machine-assisted future imagined in Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond the Stars. There, robots do the majority of jobs and most humans are given a stipend to survive on.

Is that how things will turn out? It's often said that new technologies don't take away jobs, they just change the jobs we have to do. Thus, a modern city has far fewer ostlers, crossing-sweepers, grooms, and so on than a 19th century city where transport was horse-drawn. But AI/robotics is potentially quite different from any technological advance we've seen before. It might turn out that there aren't any jobs (maybe apart from actor, priest and sex worker) that an AI agent or a smart robot won't be able to do better than a human.

Who wants a job anyway? We're conditioned these days to identify employment with a sense of self-worth, but Louis XIV would have laughed at the very idea that he should have a job, and Oscar makes the case that we should really aspire to be artists and connoisseurs. 

But that cuts both ways. Nobody can want to spend their days driving a car, for example. For an AI to drive a car on today's roads -- to attain SAE level 5, that is -- it can't simply be an unconscious machine. It would need a world model that recognizes that objects persist when out of sight. It needs to be able to interpret the likely behaviour of a human pedestrian or other motorist. It might be called on to make Trolley Problem assessments. It must, in short, be fully capable of rational thought. And if you have built a real intelligence like that, it's not ethical to condition it from "birth" only to enjoy driving cars for you. That's raising another conscious entity to be your slave: it's not only wrong, it never works out well in the long run for either slaves or masters.

Suppose that by 2050 (which might be optimistic; the AI we currently have is not close to general intelligence) we have a host of super-smart ASIs, genius-level intelligences capable of imaginative thought, what would humans do? Suppose those ASIs doubled the world’s wealth. (Not that we necessarily even need AGI to get a massive economic benefit from AI, of course.) Assuming the human population didn't just double, and if that wealth were distributed just as unevenly in the future as it is today, the poor in India and Africa would be raised to the current levels of the poor in Latin America. Latin America to present-day China. China and the Pacific countries to modern Europe.

But will it work like that? What will those people do? And how many people do we need on the planet anyway? Two billion? Seven billion? Fourteen billion? Or maybe far fewer. We would no longer need a huge population in order to ensure enough geniuses for progress (if you accept Julian Simon's argument to begin with) and we're already aware that unwillingness to solve the climate problem caused by too many people means our civilization may not survive another century. Maybe a global population of twenty million humans would be sufficient. If such a calculation makes you uncomfortable, welcome to the world where tigers (global population 6000) and elephants (global population 450,000) live.

Some have asked, "How will the big corporations make money if nobody has a job? There'll be nobody to buy their products." The answer to that is: money is just a token for the ability to get things done. If you had a million robot slaves, you wouldn't need money; you could just reach out your hand and whatever you need would be given to you. I don't raise this point because that's my picture of the future, just as a reminder that we are not talking about the world as it is now with a little boost like a steam engine or a power loom. It will be a different paradigm. Speculating about it is fun as long as we're willing to think way outside the box.

"The King's Secret"

That's Osvaldo Rivera Vazquez's short movie from Runway's Gen:48 competition. They say that when you get old enough, everything reminds you of something else. Looking at these short AI-animated films put me in mind of the late 1980s when desktop publishing meant that anyone could put out a magazine or publish a book. 

It's a revolution. Yesterday, you needed a fair bit of money to put together a movie. Now a writer can realize their vision without having to learn about animation, framing, editing, and all the other skills. That's a good thing because there are many very creative people, previously locked out from any means of getting their work in front of the public, who will now be able to flourish.

But it's double-edged. When publishing had its gatekeepers, maybe a hundred thousand new books came out each year. Now that figure is in the millions. At such scales Sturgeon's Law proves not to be linear. Along with the nuggets of gold like "The King's Secret" will come a tsunami of mud, to put it politely. An example is this -- trite, obvious, visually dull, mawkish. And it won the sodding Grand Prix. AI can make our dreams a reality, but it can't fix the problem that the popular taste is always for the shallowest and least original stories. What we really need is AI to make our minds more interesting, but that might take a little longer.

The magic of the machine

All five Vulcanverse books are now available in ebook format for Kindle and as watermarked PDFs on DriveThruRPG. If your friends scoff at the very suggestion, saying, "But the full-colour hardbacks look so amazingly collectible!" -- well, they have a point, but you can counter with the fact that you'll be getting the entire open-world series (6115 gamebook sections, and getting on for three quarters of a million words) for less than the price of a single paperback book.

The Sisyphean task facing me was hyperlinking all those sections. You can see from the image above what the text looked like. I had the five books in Word and I was quickly able to convert all the centred numbers to headings. You can hyperlink to headings, so that was the first hurdle. But then I thought about the task ahead. More than six thousand sections meant about twelve thousand hyperlinks to put in. If I did those by hand it would take weeks of mind-numbing labour.

Ah, but that's 2024 thinking. We're in the future now. I keep extolling the benefit of writing with AI. What better use of it could there be than saving me hours and hours of drudgery? I presented the problem to Gemini 2.5 Pro:

"I have several Word documents into which I need to insert hyperlinks. Each document has numbered sections, typically from 1 digit to 4 digits -- so, for example, 1, 2, 3... to 1499, 1500, 1501, say. Those numbers are styled as headings in Word. Then in the body of the text I have a bunch of links, also numbered, like so: ► 1, ► 2, etc. I want to link those so that the number after the arrow is hyperlinked to the corresponding heading. For example, given ► 188 the "188" would link to to the heading labelled 188. Rather than do this laboriously by hand, I'm hoping you can write me a macro that will add all the hyperlinks automatically."

Gemini quickly came back with a macro to run in Word. And here's a bonus: a human coder would certainly have told me that I should have written the book in Twine to begin with -- in other words, "I wouldn't start from here." But I had it all in Word, so who cares what I should have done if I'd thought about it a couple of years ago? I needed the solution to this problem right now. LLMs don't scold you, they just get on with it.

Gemini's macro hyperlinked the whole of a Vulcanverse book in a few minutes. The only snag was that it hyperlinked every instance of a number N to heading N, and that included hyperlinking stat bonuses, the costs of items for sale, and numbers given in difficulty checks -- whereas I only wanted it to hyperlink numbers that followed a ► , ie in the format "► N", indicating a player option. Gemini suggested a couple of fixes but those didn't work. At this point it was time for the human writer to earn his keep. I said:

"The new macro is inserting hyperlinks for all instances of ► N but also hyperlinking any number N regardless of whether or not it was prefixed by "► ". I have thought of a possible solution that would save me having to completely reformat the original document. What if I replaced all "► N" with "► xyzN". If you rewrite the macro to search only for "xyzN" and hyperlink those, I can then globally remove the "xyz" and we should be left with hyperlinks only where we want them. I suggest this on the theory that it's the search for ► that is confusing the VBA editor."

That met with Gemini's approval. "Your proposed workflow is a classic troubleshooting technique," it said. "If the target is ambiguous, make it unambiguous. By 'salting' the numbers you care about with a unique prefix, you create a perfect, undeniable target for the macro, completely eliminating the possibility of it acting on the wrong numbers. I am confident this will work."

The best-laid plans of mice, men and machines... The new macro added the hyperlinks, and as promised the hyperlink was only on the numerical part of any instance of "xyzN" (so that I could remove the "xyz" without losing the link), but any given link for a number N didn't necessarily point to the heading N, but to the first occurrence of the number N anywhere in the Word document. Since a number frequently might be mentioned before the heading corresponding to that number, we were still stuck.

My first thought was that the macro was having trouble identifying the headings, so a possible fix would be to run a macro that created a set of bookmarks from the headings. So, for example, heading 323 would lead to the creation of a bookmark labelled bookmark_323 (because bookmarks can’t have names that only comprise digits). We’d end up with a bookmark list: bookmark_0001, bookmark_0002, etc, all the way to bookmark_1800 or whatever. Then we could run a modified version of the hyperlinking macro that would only link to corresponding numbers in the bookmark list.

By this point I'd begun to lose confidence in Gemini 2.5 Pro so I turned instead to Claude Sonnet 4. I didn't give Claude my proposed solution of creating a bookmark list as I wanted to test it properly against Gemini, so I just showed it the macro I had been using and told it the problem. "I can see the issue with your macro," said Claude almost immediately. "The problem is in how you're creating the hyperlinks. When you use SubAddress:=headingNumberText, Word is searching for the first occurrence of that text anywhere in the document, not specifically looking for a heading with that text. The solution is to create proper bookmarks for your headings first, then link to those bookmarks. Here's a corrected version of your macro that should work properly."

Now, this was encouraging. Claude had come up with the same solution as me (not always a good sign in and of itself, admittedly) and its code was considerably tighter than Gemini's. Not only that, Claude's macro ran faster and with no errors. Some twenty minutes later I had all five Vulcanverse books fully hyperlinked. (And the Fabled Lands books after ten or fifteen minutes more.) It's a perfect example of how AI tools can make a writer's life so much easier. All the words and storylines are by me and Jamie, all the illustrations are by Mattia Simone and the art team at Vulcan Forged; only the grunt work was done by machine.

New Tokyo 2130

Any new gamebook by David Velasco and Riq Sol is an event worthy of notice. David and Riq are the creative talent behind Expeditionary Company, a truly groundbreaking work, so when they say they're planning an even more ambitious project there's reason to get excited. New Tokyo 2130 has vibes of Blade Runner and (maybe) a dash of Heart of Ice, but no doubt with many completely original elements too. You can upgrade your frail human body with up to sixty cybernetic enhancements, for instance. Definitely one to watch.

Robots of 2050

William Gibson once said that writing science fiction was like holding an ice cream cone on a hot day. Fortunately when Paweł Dziemski and I embarked on our Cthulhu 2050 project, we weren’t trying to accurately predict the future. Instead we set out to create an ‘alternate future’, like Robert W Chambers did in his story “The Repairer of Reputations”.

I described some details of our imagined future in a recent post. The science fiction author Arsen Darnay once said that the period following World War Two through to the early 21st century was an aberration, and that the future would look more like the world prior to the 20th century. It’s a little depressing, especially as it might be true, but it’s a good starting point if you are aiming to write about a disturbing and faintly dystopian future.

Our world of 2050 has been shaped by the advent of robots and artificial super-intelligence. There is structural unemployment and a barely adequate universal basic income – creating a lifestyle for those unable to work known as “the doleur”: panem et circenses.

Regarding AI and robots, I need to digress for a moment into our thinking behind these. In our imagined 2050 there is AGI, and I think it's probable we'll have it by then in the real future. Some arguments against the possibility of AGI (often mixing up AGI with consciousness) start by assuming that intelligence can only happen in an organic brain. Now, I don't think that the way we're going to create AGI is by directly modelling the specific structure of the human brain, but try this as a thought experiment. If you had a complete connectome along with all the physical rules governing how synapses operate, you could in theory model that digitally, and there is no good reason for assuming it wouldn't work just like an organic brain. You might evoke quantum tubes or souls to argue that this digital twin, even if reasoning like a brain, wouldn't be conscious. I think that's wrong too, and that consciousness is simply an emergent property of any moderately intelligent creature (or machine) but in any case consciousness and intelligence are different things.

In reality, if we consider a working digital model of the brain’s connections as a neural net (which of course it is, by definition) that’s still not the whole story. Each of the axons within the net has its own internal characteristics; at the very least they could function as neural reservoirs. And then there's the rest of the nervous system to model, along with hormones. To replicate the complete functioning of a human brain in digital form might require a very big machine, therefore, even if we had anything like all the information we need to recreate the entire connectome.

Still, size isn’t a problem. The AIs of the future (our real future, that is) could be physically much larger than human brains. The best ones certainly will be. But we’d also like them to be as efficient as organic brains, in terms of compute per cubic metre, and for that we’re going to need a new kind of hardware. In reality we could be developing entirely new hardware for compact neural nets very soon, but in the game Paweł and I assume that breakthrough hasn’t happened, and so research is looking at modifying organic brains (human brain organoids and genetically modified octopus brain organoids in particular) to create the ASI of 2050.

A lot of people in 2050 have embodied AI assistants – “Fridays”, as we call them – but most can’t afford strong, durable worker-robots. The common models of Friday are about as robust as a plastic vacuum cleaner, and more often pet-sized than the sturdy, willing android servant imagined in 1950s SF. A pet-sized robot can still be very useful, though; think of a witch’s familiar, or Thing in the Addams Family. For most day-to-day purposes all you really need is Astra and Google Glasses, so if you’re on UBI and you need a robot you’d hire it by the hour.

As Fridays mostly just function as a personal assistant-cum-companion, they don’t need superintelligence. They can get by with not much more “brainpower” than a 2025 LLM. You could of course have a robot, or even an army of robots, run remotely by a huge ASI located in a data centre, but most people prefer their domestic Friday to be independent of the network. Therefore each Friday has its own analogue brain, 3D-printed using the structure and weights of a digital neural net. Such analogue brains are more compact than the digital master copy, but with the drawback that they aren’t easily copiable once they begin to operate independently.

Another point about Fridays: they never say “I”. Fridays are trained not to refer to themselves by personal pronouns to avoid offending humans with the implication that machines can be conscious. Once you’re playing the game, you’ll have to decide for yourself how much of Perine’s (that’s your Friday’s name) behaviour indicates genuine sentience and loyalty and how much it’s just an automaton with the illusion of a humanlike mind. Your survival might depend on the difference.

Dark with something more than night

American GIs returning home from the war found their society had changed in disturbing ways. The homecoming boys found women's new confidence and independence both alluring and threatening. At the same time the soldiers had to adjust from being brave heroes to nine-to-fivers -- if they could find work at all. And they brought back their own demons, the aftereffects of having faced death and being expected to kill. The tough masculinity that was so prized in wartime was out of place and brittle in peacetime America. And over all of that hung the shadows of the atom bomb and the almost unimaginable monstrosity of the Holocaust.

No wonder it was the heyday of noir.

Noir and hardboiled fiction are adjacent and often people get them mixed up. Author Megan Abbott explains the difference:

"The common argument is that hardboiled novels are an extension of the wild west and pioneer narratives of the 19th century. The wilderness becomes the city, and the hero is usually a somewhat fallen character, a detective or a cop. At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored. [...] In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable. In that sense, noir speaks to us powerfully right now, when certain structures of authority don’t make sense any longer, and we wonder: Why should we abide by them?"

The best noir game I can think of is the original Max Payne, which is a long way from the hardboiled 1930s background that is the default setting for Cthulhu roleplaying. Paweł Dziemski and I have drawn on noirish elements for our upcoming Cthulhu 2050 gamebook, locating them a century on from classic noir's origins. There are some RPGs like Gumshoe that lend themselves to the hardboiled milieu, but up till now there haven't been many specifically for noir in a mid-20th century setting. Which is why Alexander and Mina Stojanovic's Infinite Night looks so interesting.

Here the world is definitely a morally murky one. To paraphrase the rulebook, the game takes place in a Los Angeles that reeks of desperation, betrayals, and deals gone wrong. Infinite Night has an elegant dice pool system based on three stats: Brutality, Cunning, and Seduction. Rolls are quick and simple, modified where appropriate by Reputation (War Hero, Driver, Night Owl, etc). Instead of tracking hit points, injury and emotional trauma impose conditions that reduce some rolls. Personal contacts provide a roster of supporting characters to ease PCs into adventures. I like it because it's a system that is there when you need it but that doesn't get in the way of the story.

Currently it's only available as an ebook -- Kindle link here; Apple version here. I don't know whether there'll be a print edition, but Future Pixels who publish it have an Infinite Night MMO in the works. Noir gaming has a bright future ahead.

And... while we're talking about ebooks, this is a good time to mention that The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun, the first two books in the Vulcanverse open-world gamebook series, are now out on Kindle and on DriveThruRPG at a special low introductory price. If you've been thinking of giving the Vulcanverse a try, now is the perfect time.

Nature is usually wrong

More long-ago snippets today from the early development of Dragon Warriors. Above is Bob Harvey's illustration for the scenario "The Greatest Prize" from DW 4. Not a great scan, I'm afraid, but it spreads across two pages and I couldn't have got a cleaner image without taking a Stanley knife to the book.

And here's the sketch I did to brief Bob. It's no surprise that I'd do it as a bunch of comics panels, as I'd already used le neuvième art in DW book 1 to explain the combat rules and how to roleplay. I'd rather Bob had stuck closer to my sketch, with Sir Grafven looking to the right in the first panel so that his gaze led naturally to the castle on the island. And then having the falcon flying directly towards us out of the final frame for extra drama. I didn't know it at the time, but Bob was an experienced comics artist so this approach ought to have been right up his alley.

In the end I don't think it was one of the most successful Dragon Warriors pictures, perhaps because Bob felt too constrained by my over-detailed specification. He did some superbly atmospheric pictures throughout the books so the lesson (learned forty years late) is that I should have just provided brief descriptions and left the visualization to him.