What if AI doesn't take your job, because it is your job?

My new story, The Singularity is in Beta, has just been published in Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Five, by Worldstone Publishing! It’s available in paperback and on Kindle, and would make a great summer read. Or fall read, if you’d rather. You should read it is what I’m saying.

The Singularity is in Beta is about a developing AI that trains itself not through a language or image dataset, but by directly downloading the daily experiences of humans who opt to work for it. Though the tech’s various personalities start off clunky and squarely in the uncanny valley, they grow more and more powerful, and more and more human. How are movie theaters and zoos involved? Why don’t you find out!

And for the other stories published here: All brilliant. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, they’ll change your life! But sincerely, this book has a lot of variety and a lot of really skilled authors. Dustin Bilyk of Worldstone knows how to pick ‘em, and I’m proud to be published with this group.

Roar!

A flash piece of mine – This Job is Minimum Wage and Has No Insurance – was just published by Voice.Club, a flash publisher specializing in audio fiction. My story was one of 10 selected for the theme Life is Unfair.

The story, about a zoo worker having to chase down an escaped tiger, is based on a true story from a friend who worked at the Baltimore Zoo. In all fairness, while she was asked to chase down a big cat, it wasn’t actually a tiger.

Still: Roar!

Tiger photo by Pierre Lemos

It's about birds, but there's also horses

I’m so thrilled to let you all know one of my favorite stories has been published in an anthology called Rebels, by Inkd Publishing. Rebels is extremely timely. This book covers many different ideas for what a “rebel” can be, but the overall theme, and many of the stories, are inspired by the current political situation in the United States. My story – Birds of Prey - takes place in the fractured future that feels so imminent, and was inspired by a news story I came across that discussed how birds of prey will sometimes attack people’s personal drones.

The tagline for Birds of Prey is, “In the future civil war-torn United States, weary and desperately out-gunned guerrilla fighters take up the art of falconry, using specially augmented birds of prey to bring down the military drones that hunt them.” If you’re interested, you can find the book on Amazon or wherever you get your books. The ISBN is 9798233186851.