Constructing a Dick

John Mullen Posted on by

Constructing a Dick is hard work. But I did it. I built myself a Dick, one that I hope to share with many others. In fact, in lonely moments of short-lived ecstasy, I dream of days where I share my Dick with every man, woman and child on Earth.

You may think this an unnatural pursuit. I disagree. I built my Dick with nothing but love in my heart.

So, you may ask, what does it take to build your own Dick? The first step is to select base material with the right characteristics. Give your Dick some personality. Do not seek perfection. Experience has proven that the best Dicks have flaws.

Once you have chosen the basic characteristics of your Dick, you can get down to the real work of Dick formation. These days, most Dick-builders use all ten fingers, although some erect their Dicks with just a digit or two. Pound the base material until you have a Dick with a backbone which is ramrod straight.

Dicks come in many sizes, shapes and colors, but your Dick should share one characteristic with the best Dicks in the world: even in darkness, under great pressure, your Dick should stand up for what’s right.

But enough with generalities. Let me introduce you to my Dick, Dick Young.

Dick Young is the only sentient computer on Earth and a fledgling detective. Dick would appreciate it if you bought a copy of his mystery novel, Digital Dick. Ebook and paperback editions are now available at Amazon and other book retailers.

P.S. I’d like to do this again and again and again, but I can’t keep it up any longer.

P.P.S. Please do buy Digital Dick. (Did I just say P.P.?)

 

Digital Dick Cover

Digital Dick Cover

On the Dark Side with Digital Dick – Font-Wise

John Mullen Posted on by

Among the many choices that I had to make in preparing my novel for publication, choosing the font was not one I expected. But then I received the first proof copy of Digital Dick in the mail. Holding in my hands that first, real book with my name on it validated my efforts over the previous seven years. I was an author now! I had the book to prove it.

But the text was not very dark. It wasn’t horrible, but it seemed a bit light. I emailed my book’s interior designer. I emailed Create Space.

My interior book designer sent me several other fonts that might be darker, but wouldn’t impact the page count much. If the page count changed significantly, I’d have to redo the cover for the paperback because the spine width depends on the page count. Oh, and my interior designer was booked up and wouldn’t be able to get to my revision until days ahead of my book launch. What to do?

After sending Create Space photos of the text, they responded as follows:

“… our Technical Services Team found that the text in the interior file is not set to 100% black.  To ensure that book text appears as true black in final printed form, the text color in your file needs to be set to “Black,” re-uploaded to our website, and finally, resubmitted for review.”

My book’s interior designer had a colleague check the file. It was set to 100% Black. And, a hole had opened up in her work schedule. She could work on my book immediately.

My book launch: T minus 3 weeks. I bit the bullet and asked my book designer to use Minion Pro, a different font that looked darker to me when I printed out text in a Word document. My designer sent me the revised file later that same day. I uploaded it to Create Space. And waited. Would this be the final proof?

Yes! The Minion Pro font came out darker. It looked great.

I ordered books.

You Can’t Judge a Book by It’s Cover?

John Mullen Posted on by

This old saw is both true and false. Once upon a time, book covers were plain and gave few if any clues about their books’ contents. Now, we expect a book’s cover to convey what’s inside. Often it is the cover art that sells the book. For my book, Digital Dick, I faced a dilemma. Despite my protagonist being an Artificial Intelligence, my novel is a mystery—not science fiction. The story takes place in San Diego, “in the near future.” No world-building here, no alien space creatures. When I thought about the cover, the question in my mind was: how could the cover show my AI protagonist as a sleuth? The cover is shown below. In my opinion, Mark Clements’ cover design brilliantly conveys that Digital Dick is a mystery.  What does it convey to you?

Front Cover

Digital Dick Cover

FYI, that’s Dick in the foreground. Physically, he may not look sophisticated. But it’s his software that makes Dick special, that allows him to come alive, and that brings him profound grief.

Of course, while today’s book covers attempt to convey, topically (pun intended), what’s inside, a great cover does not ensure great content. For that, you have to peer past the cover. So in that sense, it’s still true that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

For inspiration while composing this blog, I listened to Kenny Wayne Sheppard’s kick-ass version of the song, “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover.”  Here’s a link to a YouTube video of the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvpWGRFHFlc

 

Could an artificial intelligence (robot) have a soul?

John Mullen Posted on by

In my novel, Digital Dick, my artificial intelligence protagonist, Dick Young, argues with a radio evangelist about whether or not Dick has a soul.  The evangelist quotes scripture: “It is written in Genesis: ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’”  Since the Bible says that only men have been given souls (presumably this includes women, too), the evangelist argues that Dick cannot have a soul.  Dick disagrees.  He believes that ‘I think therefore I am’ implies that he, as a thinking person, has a soul.

What is the soul?  This question doesn’t seem to have a single answer.  Oprah Winfrey interviewed thirteen people including Dwayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, and Eckhart Tolle and asked them what the soul is.  (You can find a 5-minute video of these descriptions at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/what-is-the-soul-eckhart-tolle-wayne-dyer_n_2333335.html.)  Those interviewed by Oprah describe the soul as infinite, the core part of a person, the person’s essence.  Like Dick and at least one of Oprah’s guests, I associate the soul with consciousness, with the thinking part of us. At some point in the future, humans will concede that artificial intelligences think. At that point, it seems logical to me to conclude that an AI could have a soul.

In an article published in 1950, Alan Turing, often referred to as the father of Artificial Intelligence, said “In attempting to construct . . . machines [that think] we should not be irreverently usurping [God’s] power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children.  Rather, we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.”

How would you describe the soul?  Do you think an artificial intelligence could have a soul?

If we clone an artificial intelligence would each clone have its own soul? Would human clones have separate souls?