“Question Mark”

My new story at Eclectica…

QUESTION MARK

(c) Thomas J. Hubschman

My father died with a big question mark over his head like the one in the bubble over a cartoon character who can’t make up his mind. No one saw it but me. I had been sitting for two days at his bedside watching him slip from semi-consciousness into coma. I had brought The Brothers Karamazov with me to the hospital, which I had started rereading after many years when my sister called to tell me pop had had a second stroke and wasn’t expected to last long.

It seemed odd, spending those hours by his bedside in the company of both the comatose man who had begot me and with Papa Karamazov. One, my father, was about as curious and tentative a human being as I’ve ever known. The other was a self-absorbed narcissist who cared about nothing but his own pleasure. And yet, because they were both fathers, they shared something universal on that account: an unhealthy influence on their sons’ amour propre. I found the two men getting confused in my mind—lecherous, single-minded Karamazov and my own one-woman, ever-questioning parent—as the hours dragged on and I got little sleep except for cat naps on a cushioned chair a nurse kindly provided….

Read on…

Who’s Afraid of Big Bad AI?

 

Silver didrachma from Crete depicting Talos, an ancient mythical automaton with artificial intelligence.

“We think, we have consciousness, with our hands and feet, guts and muscles, just as trees “think” with their roots and leaves. To be sure, there is a way to make a machine that is identical to all the functions we have as human beings. The polite term for it is sexual intercourse.”

My latest at Eclectica: http://www.eclectica.org/v24n2/hubschman_salon.html