When people talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, the conversation usually drifts toward science fiction villains: HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey turning on the astronauts, or Skynet in The Terminator plotting humanity’s extinction. But the greater existential threat may not come from an AI killing us from the outside. It may come from within—by making us so comfortable, so idle, that we rot into irrelevance. I asked ChatGPT about it, and the result is this post, combining both my thoughts as expressed in a number of fiction writings, and the AI’s own.
Month: August 2025
Learn Tristano with AI
If you have been following this blog from the beginning, you may have run into Tristano, an artificial language I developed for some of my novels. This post contains a Tristano Grammar, and here is a basic English-Tristano dictionary. But now, thanks to AI tools, I can give you much more, including an app that translates Tristano into/from several major languages. The article itself was mostly written by Google Gemini 2.5, my collaborator for refining the language, after I had taught it to read and write Tristano.