All the Way to the Moon

Elevator – a 100 word story

The elevator went up on cables made out of carbon nanotubes, and it went all the way to the moon. There was the question of who gets to use it though. At first, it was was an elected committee that decided, but it turned out they displayed favoritism towards friends and family so it was dispensed in favor of a lottery. It was revealed that the lottery was falsified so a reality show was created instead. People held their breath and watched in wonder as the winners went up the elevator and then showed everyone what mooning was all about.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 24, All the Way to the Moon

There are two kinds of qualities, one that is found in art, music, and literature and another which is found in crafts. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at quality in crafts. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about quality. Crafting is the act of making something useful, that is something that can be used. Quality in crafting depends in part on the usability of the item that is being crafted. If a crafter makes a shoe, it wouldn’t be as useful if the shoe falls apart when you wear it so durability would be one aspect of quality in crafting. It would also have to sit comfortably on your feet. There is also a kind of subtlety in crafting that distinguishes a quality crafter from a common crafter. A crafter might increase the quality of a shoe by making it more pleasing to the eye, adding artistry to it.

When it comes to crafts, it might seem that the human touch is what distinguishes a quality crafted item from a mere factory product. This distinction is fairly dismissable these days. It is becoming very easy to make a factory product that looks like it was made by human hands and a quality product can now be made by a machine. You can say that the quality of crafting today goes into the design of the shoe, the making of the computerized 3D model that serves as a blueprint for the product. People can plan the shoe in intricate details creating the perfect shoe in a computer program, then send it for mass production. The quality resides in the amount of detail that goes into the computerized shoe model, how well it fits your feet and how durable it is. I’ll just have to go and see if the shoe fits. I’ll be right back.

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Room 306 – a 100 word story

We are pretty sure there’s a dimensional rift in room 306. Every once in a while one of our guests wanders in. The problem is it’s an exchange. What comes out looks like our guest, but we are pretty sure it’s a demon. We know it by the way he abuses hotel employees, being rude to the maids and abusive to the bell boys, so we use our demon cage to contain the abomination. Once he’s inside demanding a lawyer, we dispose of him in the river. In fact, we believe there might also be dimensional rifts in other rooms.

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Welcome back. Crafting will probably be taken out of human hands altogether in the coming years. Artificial intelligence is advancing to the point of understanding human needs and designing products that meet those needs. It would be possible to create quality products without any human intervention, and this also includes the actual design of those products. While quality in crafting was defined by the human touch for years, it is now obvious that this human touch won’t exist in future products anymore, or would at least be very rare. People would always want to craft things for their own enjoyment, but that would go into the hands of a few crafting enthusiasts, not people actually working the crafts for a living. Crafting would become a hobby for us humans.

In the meantime, while machines take over most of the quality in crafting, the question we might ask is this, is there really actual quality in machine crafted products? For a machine to be a quality crafter, there would have to be applied the same principle conditions that apply to human crafted products. The shoe would have to hold without falling apart. The shoe would have to be comfortable. The shoe would have to be pleasing to the eye, maybe even to the point of being a piece of art. Artificial intelligence will be in charge of the automatic crafting process and it is now learning how to also become an artist. There are already examples of artworks created by machine-learning artificial intelligence programs.

The distinction between human intelligence and an artificial one is becoming more and more blurred as we go into the future. Artificial intelligence itself might actually become one of the last quality crafted items. When the machines we craft become more intelligent than us, they might become the pinnacle of quality in crafting, the crafting of another living organism, made not of flesh and bones but of plastic and metal. The crafting of the ultimate quality crafter. This concludes episode 24 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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