A quantum computer.

I answered a question on Quora the other day: "In what ways has e-publishing changed the way literature is delivered and consumed?", but not exactly. It got me thinking about the state of literature and books and authors themselves in the near future and my conclusion was that advancing science, computers to be exact, are going to kill writing as we know it.

"Science has and will continue to change it radically, so much so, that in the next decade writing as we know it by human beings, (except for a few old timers and dinosaurs) will be extinct. Computers will generate writing and present day writers, with the help of computers, will produce not text and books but fully complete movies. I’ve written two novels in the last few years and envisioned every scene and character as if they were to be on the big screen. I started including pictures in my stories from the prompts from sites like this one. I never thought of doing that before but once I started, I liked the results and left many of the pictures in when I had copies printed. I now wish they were more than pictures but the brief videos that played out in my mind. Technology will soon be able to allow me to do this.

"Consider silent movies, when actors studied the slightest facial and body movements to convey meaning. With the advent of sound that art died out as unnecessary and many silent actors disappeared overnight. Advancing technology sidelined their talents and actors with skills in voice and intonation took over.

"Movies are a better, fuller medium than just words. They can convey a larger slice of reality or imagination. A picture is worth a thousand words, a movie a million. My next book will be a script fattened with staging directions and come out to you in full technicolor as a motion picture two hours long."

We may not like the future, but we really can't fight it.