Anybody read this short story? Spoilers follow, although it’s more of a straightforward speculative piece, there’s no big twist as in many of his stories.
In the story, a man sees how powerful computers have become and wonders: if computers follow rules, and words have rules, why couldn’t computers write words?
“A machine cannot have a brain. On the other hand, it can have a memory, can it not? Would it not be possible, on this principle, to build a memory of almost unlimited size?”
His companion questions why anybody would want to read a story written by a computer.
“Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. And stories - well - they’re just another product. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country!”
That done, he then sets out to pay the big human authors money to never write again, and let him put their names on his stuff. But he has to be careful:
“Thereafter, Knipe wisely decided to concentrate only on mediocrity. Anything better than that - and there were so few it didn’t matter much - was apparently not quite so easy to seduce. He found that the older ones, those who were running out of ideas, were the easiest to handle. The younger people were more troublesome. They were apt to become abusive when he approached them.”
Finally:
“This last year it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were published by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.”
Uncanny stuff, eh…
submitted by /u/Ok_Grapefruit8169[link] [comments]