Welcome to Litsy!

May reading - not including digital/audio reads for a total of 14 this month- with a side of cacti friends. Fave of the month was Rise of the Red Blade, least fave The Spanish Love Deception.

My luck with short story (and a teeny bit of poetry) collections written by ONE author continues, I found a lot to enjoy here. I wasn't sure what the ratio would be, but I'd say two thirds fantasy, one-third sci fi. I think in future I'd be happy to investigate any sci fi or sci fi/fantasy mixes by this author under a certain length. 1/?

The idea of the Turing test, in its search for humanity, being as much a test of the humans fostering a machine intelligence as it is of the developing machine.
Surprised how it hit me.
The best case scenario of true AI is one which results from humans never forgetting their humanity in the effort to infuse intelligence into a machine, which gives the machine the best chance to reflect the best of us. 🥹

A perspective I hadn't considered on the Turing test.
Probably should have considering how similar it is to rebuttals about the narrow form testing has often taken in gauging the intelligence of living beings other than humans in animal welfare discussions.

In that sense, humans are as likely to be 'programmed' into certain responses as machine intelligence might be.
Social conditioning is some deeply embedded code!

Evocative, lush, and uncomfortable.
An accomplished description!

@Billypar such sad news. What a gift to have a long life. Thank you so much for introducing her to me! I‘ve read out all the books the library had of hers. ♥️

This is a fine collection of about 40 short stories Fitzgerald wrote with a brief introduction when and where they were published and a few lines with fascinating facts about them. I loved Winter Dreams written while he was planning The Great Gatsby and The Swimmers which Fitzgerald described as “the hardest story I ever wrote.”

Today's 'scratched my brain just right' sentence.

A true Saunders book. It's uncomfortable, it makes us feel uneasy and the characters are mostly unlikable. But it's exactly that what makes those stories outstanding. They challenge us, make us see how we really are. We all have to face our own demons and fears, Saunders simply forms them into stories. We are just thrown into the world of the characters, we take a glimpse at their lives, and then we're gone again. Thinking about our own realities.