Gratitude—The Secret of Success

November 26^th is the anniversary of my official life as a published writer. It’s been two years since eHuman Dawn found a place on  the Amazon virtual bookshelf and I honestly must say that I have a wonderful life. No, I’m not famous and I’m certainly not able to feed myself on my writing, however it feels like everything else in life is coming together to make it possible for me to do what I love with the time I have.

It isn’t just the writing, I also spend my days raising my sons, playing music, teaching children to dance, knitting, spinning, speaking at Brighter Brains events, blogging, reading up on technology and science and of course—writing novels!

We live in some amazing times. Yes, there are risks and threats, but I’ve found that in spite of all the darkness that surrounds me, or the impossibilities of my dreams, there’s one sure way to lift myself from hopelessness and into possibility—a thankful heart. There are entire sections of the library devoted to self-help and techniques for success, but I think gratitude is really the easiest way to feel satisfied with life, which to me is the definition of success.

As such, in my annual Thanksgiving Blog, I shall do just that—GIVE THANKS!!!!

There are many people to thank for my wonderful life, but first and foremost, I thank my husband. He’s the one who supported me first in this endeavor. It all began when I decided to leave my software job to stay home and raise the kids. He never once said we couldn’t afford it or that I was wrong to throw away my career. Instead he believed that I knew best what was in my heart and supported me. Fast forward to the past two years and he’s still encouraging me to follow my heart by supporting my even crazier decision to become a novelist. If raising kids was tricky, writing stories and trying to get people to read them is insane! The rest of my family is supportive as well, but my husband is the best cheerleader I have.

I’m also grateful for my Airbnb business, which has allowed me to make money to support my writing while having the time to actually write. Even two years ago, when I posted my first blog, I had no idea that within a year I’d have a steady income source from my own home. Technology is truly the great equalizer and while many mistrust the “sharing economy,” as an artist, I love the stability it provides as I invest in my creative career.

And of course, I want to thank the readers. Perhaps you only read my blog, or my work posted on IEET. Maybe you’re a follower on Twitter or a friend who loyally reads my work. No matter what level your interest is, I’m glad you found me and I want to hear from you. Honestly, dialogue is the key to innovation, so let’s get connected on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, or Goodreads. I think there’s a lot a community of readers can do for the world.

And it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without FREE books. Both eHuman Dawn and eHuman Deception will be FREE ON KINDLE from 11/26/15 – 11/30/2015. If you’ve been thinking about downloading the sequel, now’s the time. Take that Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

And don’t forget that paperback copies of the eHuman novels make great holiday gifts!!!!!

Thanks again for your interest and I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season, starting with a day of thanks. My wish is that every one of you finds joy in the life you’ve been living. 

A grateful heart is one that is truly free in life.

The TV Series Humans: A Deep Look into Our Humanity

[MAJOR, HUGE Spoiler Alert]

I recently binge watched my first TV series, Humans, which airs Sunday nights on AMC. As a science fiction writer myself, many people have been suggesting I check it out for weeks now. Finally I gave in, sat down on the couch, and watched the first six episodes over the course of two days. Not bad for a mother of two. And now, two weeks later, I’ve finished the entire first season.

First and foremost, this is a lovely science fiction TV series. Well written, acted and produced, it was a joy to have something to look forward to on Sunday nights. From the X-Files like opening credits to the way consciousness, both “real” and “artificial” are intertwined, I found myself interested on many various levels.

Humans is the story of a world where robots have become a standard appliance in the household. Called Synths, these robots have all the capacities to cook, clean, harvest food, drive cars, care for children, administer medicine, have sex and basically do everything humans can, except love. They aren’t true artificial intelligence, think Siri inside of a mannequin, but they look so much like real humans, one doesn’t even know the difference during sex!

This choice in itself is very telling—why would we want our servants to look like us? Shouldn’t a machine look like, well a machine? I’ve always imagined my household robot to look like Rosie from the Jetsons, or C3P0, but not Barbie and Ken. The fact that Synths look just like the most beautiful of us, but act like programmed machines without fear or emotions, makes the plot more compelling. Synths aren’t able to lie, or disobey the orders of their primary users. They’re completely complicit in all actions, even in sex. Which leads to all sorts of human abuse, from whorehouses to Smash Clubs, where humans can pay a fee to beat Synths with a baseball bat for fun.

The writers of Humans cover a ton in this opening season. Within the first hour, we’re introduced to four main sets of characters, each with their own relationships to Synths covering a range of emotions—from jealousy to adoration—all for inanimate objects built to serve them.

The Hawkins family is at the center of this drama. Laura Hawkins is an attorney who travels a lot for work. Her husband, Joe, is often left behind caring for the family while trying to balance office employment as well. Their eldest child, Mattie, is a brilliant high school upperclassman who can hack into Synths, and other computer systems, at will. Her idea of fun is hanging out on a Hackers website downloading code to make the Synths at her school steal equipment, or fail at their jobs. Toby, her younger high school aged brother, is your typical adolescent male—awkward and horny, yet kind and earnest in a sweet way. Their last child, Sophie, is in grade school, eight years old at most, and still needs her family to care for her in ways they all seem too busy to handle.

The series starts with Laura’s most recent trip away going longer than intended and Joe not wanting to be the mother while she’s away. So off the Hawkins go, to the local Synth store, to pick up their very own, brand new Synth. This Synth, whom Sophie eventually names Anita, happens to be beautiful, charming and much better at everything it seems, than Laura.

The writers of Humans play with this idea a bit in each of the first five episodes—how inadequate Laura feels to Anita when it comes to homemaking. Even though Laura is excellent at her career, she’s triggered by her children’s love for the Synth (Sophie would rather Anita put her to bed and Toby himself forms a crush on the beautiful robot.) Rather than bring them closer together, Joe’s purchase adds stress and tension to an already overloaded family life.  It seems the Synth’s existence puts parenting, and marriage, at risk of becoming redundant.

Another aspect of relationship covered is sexuality. Toby’s crush on a robot displays the innocence of loving something that can’t love you back. Joe eventually falls for Anita as well, using her sexually to make up for the distance that seems to be getting bigger between him and his wife. When Laura eventually discovers that Joe has, “initiated the Adult Sequence,” she’s angry and hurt. He can’t understand why, because after all, Anita’s, “…just a sex toy.” Laura’s response is startling, “She cares for our children, and you call her a sex toy?
”

It isn’t just the women who are made to feel inadequate by their Synth companions. Detective Pete Drummond finds himself in a similar situation, only the Synth in his house is Simon, given to his wife, Jill, after an accident injured her ability use her legs. The Health Service mandated a Synth in the home until she gets better. Simon thus helps the injured Jill in ways that Peter thinks should be his role. His feelings of inadequacy are succinctly summarized in his line, “I’m an analog man in a digital world. I’m redundant.” Just like Laura, he feels replaced, and his partner has left him for a droid that had been forced into their house by the insurance company.

Which brings us to the last home we’re introduced to, George Millican and his Synth, Odi, one of the first Synths ever made. Odi is a Class D model, which happens to be the series that George himself helped to make. But Odi is getting old, falling apart, and losing his memory. Not unlike an aging man, he is no longer able to care for George, who is an old man himself. Yet George loves him dearly, just like a son. Because George has had a stroke, he’s on a Health Service plan and is required to upgrade his Synth to a newer model, one that will follow his General Practitioner’s orders without question, and force him to take his meds, get to bed on time, and eat only approved food. The irony that his own invention would eventually remove all his personal freedoms is not lost. It’s everyone’s worst nightmare and in some ways is worse than losing your job to automation—losing your right to choose your health care protocol is no small matter.

But Humans isn’t only about Synths and their uses in the home. It’s also about artificial intelligence and true consciousness. For Anita, the Hawking’s Synth, isn’t a brand new model, rather she’s part of a special group of Synths that were given true consciousness by their maker, David Elster, who was the mastermind behind the Synth project. He’d lured George from MIT to work with him, eventually creating the early Class D models. But Elster desired more from his project—he planned to create true consciousness within Synths, and George wanted no part of that. He left the project, but it seems that ten years later, Elster did have his way, and managed to create five perfectly conscious Synths, robots who can think, feel and understand the world they live in.

Anita is one of these, stolen from her owner, Leo Esther, reprogrammed and sold to the Hawkins. Leo, along with one of her “siblings” Max, is trying to get her back. In addition, two of her other “siblings”, Fred and Niska, were also stolen and put back into the Synth world. Both are pretending to be normal Synths, while waiting for Leo to rescue them.

These four special Synths, plus Leo, have been on the run since David Elster, who is also Leo’s father, committed suicide for reasons yet unknown. Humanity in general would fear them if they discovered their true essence. And of course, the government officials want them for various nefarious reasons, and often it seems there is nowhere for them to be safe.

And then there’s Karen Voss—a truly conscious Synth who’s been undercover as a Human detective working alongside Pete Drummond for some time. Why isn’t she with Leo and the others? Her maker is one and the same, but through rejection and the insanity of Elster, she lives alone for most of her life trying to find a way to fit into the human world without blowing her cover. She’s lonely and fears her own kind. How Drummond, who hates Synths, comes to still trust and care for her even after he knows the truth is a glance at what it will take in the future for us to overcome the technological xenophobia that surely must be on the horizon.

All three households, as well as Leo’s gang of perfect Synths, come together while trying to avoid being caught by the government, who wants to own them. Along the way their activities address the deepest issues of our humanity. It would take another thousand words to address all of them, but I’d like to end with a few quotes that I think hit on some of the key themes of the series.

First, when confronted with killing a man after spending days being abused in a whorehouse, Niska, the beautiful, fully conscious blonde replies, “You act as though life cannot be manufactured.”

Second, when the Mattie asks Max, “What’s it like to be you?” he responds with a smile, “Fearful. Intense. Like my emotions are too big. What’s it like to be an adolescent girl?”

She looks at him, shrugs and replies, “The same.”

I highly recommend the Humans. If you haven’t watched it, sorry for the spoilers. The good news is, there are only eight episodes in the first season, so you can catch up very quickly before the fall. Enjoy!

Book Review: Abundance--A Must Read for Any Futurist

Authors Peter H. Diamandis and Steve Kotler have created just about the perfect handbook when it comes to envisioning a technically advanced, democratic and thriving society. Written in 2012, this book is still an important read for anyone who’s interested in a technical future where humanity finally rises above the mire it has been tethered to for millennia.

Much can be said about the book, but there are two aspects that put Abundance at the top of my recommended reading list. First, Diamandis starts out by addressing the most obvious elephant in the room when it comes to hindering progress: our Cognitive Biases. We tend to be negative creatures, programmed from birth to fear our world and each other. Scarcity is driven into our minds, from supply-side economics to original sin. The media focuses on bad news because that’s what the human mind responds to. While we claim to desire happiness and peace, most people simply don’t believe that they, or anyone else, deserve it.

Diamandis goes straight to the heart of the matter by addressing this flaw, and why it holds us back. The reason technology hasn’t lived up to its promise is because we’ve been thwarting progress with our negativity. In order to free technology and allow it to evolve, we too must free our own minds and evolve from our reptilian, amygdala driven patterns, to higher order thinking and use of the frontal lobes of our brains. This is not a simple task, but in the grand scheme of things, there’s nothing more important than for us to realize that life is actually much better than it’s ever been and that the future will serve us even more when we trust in the abundance of both the Earth and our capabilities.

Basically we need to rewire our brains. We’re still heavily relying on a hardware platform designed to keep us safe from wild animals, weather and other threats our ancient ancestors had to deal with. As Diamandis writes,

“…our early warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Things have changed. Many of today’s dangers are probabilistic—the economy might nose-dive, there could be a terrorist attack—and the amygdala can’t tell the difference. Worse, the system is also designed not to shut off until the potential danger has vanished completely, but probabilistic dangers never vanish completely.”

Physically our brains have grown in size, particularly in the frontal lobe, since the days of the caveman. We have an entire neurology we can embrace, and with it, a totally different perspective of life. Essentially we’ve evolved the hardware to be capable of seeing the systems before us and know that scarcity is something we can overcome, if we chose to believe in it. There’s really no other way.

As long as we remain stuck in the endless negative threat loop, our technology will be held hostage by fearful minds.

Diamandis goes on to point out,

“For abundance, all this carries a triple penalty. First, it’s hard to be optimistic, because the brain’s filtering architecture is pessimistic by design. Second, good news is drowned out, because it’s in the media’s best interest to overemphasize the bad. Third, scientists have discovered an even bigger cost: it’s not just that these survival instincts make us believe that the hold we’re in is too big to climb out of, but they also limit our desire to climb out of that hole.”

What follows after this realization is an attempt by the authors to show your logical brain, that part of you that thinks beyond threat, why you can believe in a better future, using both science and personal stories to prove their point. It’s a brilliant exercise in cheerleading for their cause: an abundant future for all Earth’s citizens.

The second reason I recommend this book is because of its treatment of the BOP, or the over four billion people on our planet who live at the Bottom of The Pyramid, on less than $2 a day. Imagine it, four billion of us live in extreme poverty. Many of us spin our wheels trying to figure out how to get our resources to this group. This book actually gives us a blueprint that doesn’t merely suggest we share our resources with these folks, rather that we make the resources of the Earth and technology available to them in a variety of ways. From Technophilanthropists to the effects of putting cheap Smartphones in the pockets of villagers in West Africa, the possibilities to liberate half the world from poverty are literally in the palm of our hands.

For example, we in the west often look at our Smartphones as luxuries, but to someone in the BOP, it’s a way to share goods with others, discover information about clean water sources, and inform the world when violence erupts in the middle of the night. As they come online, they become a part of the global economy, which changes everything.

Not enough is written about the BOP as a group of consumers. Recipients of charity, yes. But as the old saying goes, “You can give a man a fish, but better to teach him how to fish,” the same holds true for the BOP and technology. This is the market place where solar paneled eco-friendly housing and inexpensive water filtration systems will come to be. Food distribution and agriculture as we know it will dramatically change when we invest in the BOP, which in turn will teach us how to manage the world when 9 billion of us roam the streets.

Abundance—The Future is Better Than You Think was a great read, and belongs on home bookshelves everywhere. Next on my reading list, BOLD, the authors how-to-guide follow up. If anyone can inspire us to make a difference, it’s Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.