Steve Jobs Is Risen!
Did you catch Steve Jobs as a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast a month ago? Oh, it was fascinating. “Computers have the power to be 1,000 times more important than they are today. I throw my computer out the window every few years just to make sure it works.” Steve was in his signature form, visionary and funny, as he told some truly curious stories from the history of Apple. But wait… didn’t Steve Jobs pass away? So what? The interview is perfectly real. It was generated by artificial intelligence. What’s the big deal, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Want to chat with Einstein? No problem, technology makes even that possible. Are we ready for the moment when computers can imitate us so well that we won’t be able to tell ourselves apart? How is it possible, and is it right, to try to “resurrect” people by creating, one way or another, copies of them that are indistinguishable from the original?
02Yevgeny Zamyatin: The Forgotten Prophet
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is a brilliant novel because it offers a glimpse of a future in which technology has defeated humanity, locked people in its mathematical grip and turned them into numbers, into tools. We often mention Orwell and Aldous Huxley, and rightly so, but this writer inspired them both. His only novel is a dystopia no less thought-provoking than theirs, because it looks not so much at a possible totalitarianism as in a direction that is even more relevant today.
03“The World Reeks of Kitsch. That’s Why It’s Heading for Catastrophe”
“People still have 10,000 ways to think and to look at the world. And what do they do, damn it? They stare at their phones. The children growing up now have never seen what’s around them. They are the subject of science fiction, living in a parallel world. They don’t know what the streets look like, what people look like. It makes me think there’s no hope. Who will bring them into this world? If it happens by chance, they’ll be shattered.” Tekla Aleksieva became a legendary illustrator after creating 120 covers for the Galaktika Library, Bulgaria’s cult science fiction series. Generations of readers link the greatest science fiction novels with the images she painted. Besides being an artist with a singular eye and countless accolades, she is also the author of a poetry collection. What does she think of images generated by artificial intelligence? Why does she believe we are surrounded by kitsch on every side—in literature, in art, in life? Can we get our good taste back, and how? Why must we never, under any circumstances, leave the Earth? And how is it that... Tekla Aleksieva never managed to finish the book behind one of her most famous covers?
