I was at work, where tattoos are in short supply and good writing even more so. I shrugged it off and turned the discussion to baseball.
Later, though, I mulled it over. Why write? Aren’t there better things to do with my time than sit down at the typewriter and bleed? Either Mr. Hemingway said that or it’s a hallucination.
Was I born a writer, or did my life experiences direct me there? The old nature versus nurture question. I wasn’t sure.
In 8th grade, I received one of the few As in my schooling career for a paper I wrote about James Baldwin’s short story Sonny’s Blues. It’s about how the narrator doesn’t understand his brother’s obsession with Jazz until he experiences his own tragedy, at which point he realizes jazz is ultimately about how people endure the human struggle and find delight in the world. Probably why I like jazz so much.
In ninth grade, I took a typing glass. Sometimes age comes with benefits. I took the class to meet girls since I was bad at sports. That worked out about like you might expect.
No TV in my household growing up, no sir. As a child I read every book I could find, starting with Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys before graduating to arm chair mysteries like Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolf. Eventually, I moved on to thrillers like Ken Follett and Vince Flynn and, of course, Tom Clancy. Through it all, I knew I could write better stories.
It took me a long time to try. I was mired in the Standard American Dream, which is sad, I know, but honestly, it served me well. Until now. More on that later. I wrote my first story in 2001 while laying on the cold marble floor of my flat in New Delhi trying to stave off the 120-degree (F) heat. I threw the story away.
Then the kindle thing happened in 2007. In 2012, I realized I could write my own brand of fiction, skip the publishing gate-keepers, and publish directly to my fans. I didn’t have any fans, but that didn’t dissuade me. After I wrote three full-length novels (and shelved them all in Dropbox), I finally published my first one in 2016. That novel went on to become an Amazon bestseller and currently has over ten thousand reviews on Amazon.
Fast forward a few more years, and I now have seven published thriller novels and a loose plan to leave my day job to write full time. Had a plan to leave my day job, I should say. With just under eight thousand email subscribers and several hundred thousand copies of my books sold, I was on my way.
Funny sidebar. A friend of mine found out I was an author and he asked me to send him one of my books. Which I did. Turns out, he’s already read all of them. To be fair, I write under a pen name.
Then AI happened, and I lost that lovin’ feeling. Anyone with Edgar Award dreams can upload AI slop to Amazon and call it fiction, so why bother? That oddly coincided with my work-friend’s question about why I like to write.
And led to me being here on Substack, jotting my life away to you instead of writing fiction. Which I’m really enjoying.
So Why Am I Here?
Let me unpack it, stay with me.
The world seems a dramatically more chaotic place now than when I was younger. At first, I chalked it up to OLD, a syndrome coined by my father. But there is research to support that the pace of life is indeed quicker now than in 1980, and that the frequency (and severity) of natural disasters and protests/conflicts has increased. Certainly, access to information, aggressive FOMO, and micro-fluctuations of dopamine have also soared.
I’ve been through my share of technological disruptions. We got our first Apple Macintosh in 1986. I made my first mobile phone call to my mother on a ‘brick’ phone in 1993. I started my technology career in the middle of the dot-com boom and bust. I was quick to buy the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. I embraced the aforementioned direct-to-consumer Amazon publishing boom, and I even avoided buying NFTs in 2021.
I lived through it all, embraced every bit, made a career out of it, and had a ton of fun along the way.
Then along came AI
When the Ars Technica article about ChatGPT 3.5 came out on December 1, 2022, I paid attention, as one does as the head of technology for a medium-sized travel company. It wasn’t until almost a year and a half later that I realized the implications to my fiction writing plan.
This was right about the time articles started appearing about people uploading manuscripts to Amazon with the AI prompts still in them. Floods of AI dreck hitting the Amazon servers every day.
Yikes.
In a fit of despair, I penned an article called “Why Bother?” It started as a piece on the futility of making money as an artist in the age of AI, but it’s evolving to be about the intrinsic nature of being an artist in the age of AI and about my belief that humans will persevere and win. I’m still working on it. Stay tuned.
Then I started writing a book called AI Demystified. More of a pamphlet, really. It’s for my parents. And anyone else who wants to learn the basics of artificial intelligence (spoiler alert, I tried to have AI write the book, but it was so bad I’m re-writing it. AI can’t even write a book about itself. HA HA.)
In the process of working on both pieces, I learned a ton. I learned about what’s important to me. I learned about the nuances of AI and how it works. And what AI is good for, and what it’s not. I reclaimed my optimism for the human race and remembered how fun the past advances in technologies were (are). I came up with the name of my Substack – Human Powered – and most importantly; I learned (remembered?) why I write.
I write for two reasons
I write to make sense of the world.
Writing helps me structure my thoughts. It helps me understand and learn. It nudges me to expand my thinking and abandon my biases. Writing promotes exploration and nourishes knowledge in ways that expand my thinking.
And I write to connect with other humans.
A few years ago, I received an email from the daughter of an old man who had recently passed away from cancer. She told me about how she read my books to her father during his cancer treatments, and about how much he loved the stories, and how they helped distract him from being sick.
A human connection.
Welcome to Human Powered, a newsletter about the confluence of humans and technology, with a focus on AI.
I’m looking forward to meeting the like-minded and contrarians alike, who are interested in discourse on technology and discovering our way through this and future technological change.
The newsletter will share deep dives, analysis, and curated updates along my journey with a focus on how AI and other technologies impact the human experience. For better, or not.
It’s an optimistic outlook, so please join me if you’re into that.
I look forward to the discussion.
