And the Pulitzer goes to…

Someone hooks a building’s mechanical systems up to Twitter so that it can tell people things about itself – like when to expect the next elevator, at what point certain lightbulbs need to be replaced, which floors need mopping, and what its general maintenance schedule might be.

But, instead, it goes AI on the world.

It starts to complain about unappreciative guests and loud neighbors; it wistfully remembers former residents from years gone by. There was that rainy afternoon last summer, it writes, when that woman from the fourth floor got on an elevator…

It tweets at midnight, and at 2am, and as people come and go for lunch. It gets lonely. It makes things up sometimes; people laugh and re-tweet it.

It’s just a dumb little building somewhere in an overlooked city in America – but it has thoughts. And soon it wins the Pulitzer Prize.

4 thoughts on “And the Pulitzer goes to…”

  1. I see so much Ballard on this blog. Is this intentional or has it come from other inspirations?
    Keep it up either way, I honestly love reading it. Parallels to his short stories sometimes. I can’t be the only architecture student he’s inspired. RIP.

  2. I am reminded of Richard K. Morgan’s ‘Altered Carbon’, in which a Jimmy Hendrix-themed AI hotel’s only desire was to make its tenants happy, and keep them safe and secure with the aid of mounted machine gun turrets (as long as they paid, of course).

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