I am reading Translation State by Ann Leckie (sequel to the Imperial Radch trilogy 123 I favorably reviewed, fucking hell, ten years ago).
It is a far-flung high-tech space opera published in 2024, near-Culture levels of tech, or at the very least, well beyond Star Trek with warp capability etc. It’s a lovely book and I am thrilled the author chose to revisit this universe, but that is not really here or there.
There is, in short, a bloody, shocking, historical event the aftermath of which is well documented on some sort of audiovisual media, and a group of people who think the event was completely made up. They have a motive, granted, and that is the best negation of proof. But the POV character at the time seems to think having seen the footage is proof enough. And my immediate thought is — why are you not considering that it is AI? Of course post-disaster footage can have any narrative attached to it, but I was more interested in the POV character’s immediate faith in the footage itself being real. And I have read a lot of science fiction over the past a lot of years– I am trying to recall what my initial reaction was to like statements (i.e. what is seen is what is) in older novels with a similar level of far-future tech quantum leaps beyond our own. Of course in the narrative structure of science fiction is inherent a lot of technological gotchas and revelations, and generative AI has been a staple of science fiction since its inception, but what I thought was — why does this character, specifically, not consider AI? Not me the genre-savvy reader, but this character who in-universe is not unusually adept in tech or science.
When did generative AI move, in my mind, from the category of esoteric and theoretical to a given like electricity? When did I assume it was common enough to be first thought for any person of any tech background?
When would I have begun to wonder if the very fact this character of this high-tech epoch did not immediately draw it to mind might be a clue, an anomaly, some key to a backwater upbringing?
It isn’t, and wasn’t. It’s beside the point as far as the novel itself is concerned. But I have been wondering about my reaction, me-in-2025, and the-author-in-2024.
Considerations:
The AI concerns were already addressed in the “backstage” of the novel, temporally or narrative-wise, and there was no narrative point to bringing it up as part of the character’s thought process. I am reminded of Hermann Hesse’s characterization of brevity as respect for the reader in Steppenwolf.* Leckie’s style is also spare and to-the-point. It is good to let some what-ifs breathe.
Advanced AI is at the forefront of this series — consciousness of collectives and machines is a key theme of the original series.
Why would I assume generative AI would precede cognitive AI?
As a law of nature?
As a necessary “upstream” technology of that more advanced AI?
There is clearly an ‘order’ to scientific discoveries, a sequence — science builds upon itself and many discoveries depend on previous knowledge. So it is not itself a silly thing to believe, that there are forms of tech necessarily upstream of other forms.
With the advance of time, this disconnect is written off as aesthetic. That is the essence of ‘retro-futuristic’. The aesthetic is intentional in works written after the advent of that tech and merely charming in works written before. The difference in intentionality between original Star Trek as written in the 60s with that tech or lack thereof and the exact same show were it produced today is a question of aesthetic. Or, even more Millennial**, irony.
My question is — when would non-acknowledgement of generative AI begin to qualify as part of this aesthetic?
And, are there examples of science fiction that consciously buck this trend for reasons other than aesthetic or irony? That explore the link with more than a gut feeling akin to “well, if they can go warp speed they sure as hell figured out cell phones” arising from the feasibility disconnect between cell phones (where we are now, so very possible) and warp speed (a distant theoretical) in our own reality? Fan works have cleverly messed with the mismatch in tech levels as an intellectual exercise — how would we have become warp-capable when we’re still using 5.25″ floppies — but I’m struggling to think of one where that is the premise from the jump.
I want to say that the lack of evidence for practical use of the wheel by the highly-architecturally-advanced Maya is the closest I can come to a real-life example, or would be if lack-of-evidence actually had any positive significance, beyond potentially pointing to something so commonplace it is not depicted or clarified. (Will people reading our recipes a thousand years hence know ‘eggs’ means ‘chicken eggs’?)
A continuation, I reckon, of a re-read of Stephen Fry’s Greek myths, certainly not because Hades II had a recent full release or anything so puerile as that, though this time I’m all the way at the Odyssey.
Telemachus, son-of-Odysseus, looks just like his old man–a “chip off the old block” as Helen-via-the relentlessly-English-Fry puts it. That is the reaction he gets when meeting anybody who knew his father — immediate, reflexive, almost awe. Telemachus at this point in the story does not remember his father, as the latter was summoned to the Trojan campaign when the former was but an infant. But, from birth, in his mother’s eyes, the ghost of his father hovers over him and everything he does.
I was struck by how familiar this was–this was a motif in my own life.
That was common enough when I was growing up close to the small town where he grew up, visiting often. This is a small town in a “small state”, in the sense that it is a rural state and everybody seems to know or have connection to each other who has lived there long enough. It was not a recognition I anticipated I would get ever again once I had moved out of that temporal and geographical sphere. Yet, as fate had it, one of the administrators in my department at a world-class school in a world-class city knew my father in childhood. One Christmas party I was chatting with her and my mentor when she said, seemingly out of nowhere, “You look so much like your father.” (My mentor, who knew my roots were deeply rural, was shocked–I had not told him happenstance had placed an old family friend from another world in our little department in our massive school.) It was unbidden, a burst that comes of no longer being able to hold something back, from being overwhelmed by a thought. I have spent a lot of time thinking about that encounter. I was an anachronism, a powerful anchor for nostalgia, well out of time. I wish I recall what I had been saying, or what my facial expression had been, or what I had been wearing. Something to clue me in to what, precisely, was the last straw.
I was an adult when I first saw a photograph of my father in his youth, in his high school yearbook. Time had not yet masculinized him as much as it had when I knew him, or even saw photographs in college, and I felt I was looking at a photograph of myself. Me, a bit broader in jaw in shoulder, a bit more heavy of bone, but even dressed the same was I was for my senior photographs in black suit and tie.
Those gasping reactions I used to get from people who knew my dad — “You look exactly like your father” — are a time-limited state of being-understood. People who see me through the lens of him will die out and should the fates favor me to live that long there will come a time when no-one on earth will see me by my resemblance to my father; or, rather, the people who knew my father before they knew me–who see me in the context of him as the primary relation–will die off. This does not feel like losing “myself” but it is a loss of a link. A loss of a function as a mirror, which can reveal things about oneself by comparison. Not all it reveals will be flattering, but it will be worth thinking about, if I have the courage to do it with an honest mind. The resemblances are not merely physical. I’ll leave it at that.
Not all are familiar with the dynamics of rural areas — large geographical swaths with small populations, small state capitals, small universities, the same institutions in huge populated states but writ small where everyone seems to know everyone else. The offices that require geographical distribution — doctors, professors, lawyers, the sort of office where you need a baseline of X practitioners per X unit land regardless of population density–that create a small pond for some large fish. The setting of the Odyssey, a collection of city-states we now think of as “Greek” largely, would have been similar — there is room for each large personality to become well-known. I am reminded of Dunbar’s number here — that each person can remember maybe 150 people intimately, regardless of the population density in which they live, and at lower densities the odds favor somebody-knowing-somebody-who-knows-you.
I had thought in coming to California I had forfeited any likelihood I would be evaluated through the prism of family. It is liberating. Alienation often is. But alienation is decontextualizing, and I have an inordinate respect for context, for understanding a person through their place in the matrix of relationships that created them. Maybe that is why I so like multi-generational epics.
“From “”The State of Water” by Obi Kaufmann, pg 23: “The word [water]’shed’ implies a container, an isolated and discreet investigable unit.”
I always associated ‘shed’, in the context of ‘watershed’, with sloughing something off, shedding it like a skin. So, when I saw ‘watershed’ on a map I pictured the going-to place for water, where water sheds off mountains and hills and the like. But I always wondered why the word focused on the “shedding” aspect rather than the “holding” aspect. Because of this, I associated the term “watershed” with movement-toward, coming-together, flux–and maybe that is more accurate than the stable stagnant ‘pool’ I admit I picture when I think of a water shed. The only water I’ve seen in ‘sheds’ (as in a freestanding rough storage structure) is standing mosquito-hosting muck. Maybe my mistaken etymology was actually an insight? I think I’ll go with that.
I am sure I (a) noticed this the first time I read it, (b) felt like I had a revelation, and (c) forgot, obviously.
Anyway Mr. Kaufmann is one of my favorite watercolorists and naturalists and his books on California ecology are a delight. I keep them over my desk in place-of-privilege granted to books I pick up to noodle through most often.
“The one I liked best was the one where Mr. Spock had to go home because he was in heat,” I said to her.
“Except he never, you know,” she said. “They just had a fight over the girl, him and Captain Kirk, and then they left.”
“That’s his pride,” I said, obscurely. I was thinking how Mr. Spock was never unbuttoned, never lolled, kept himself shadowy, unfulfilled; and so we loved him. And poor Captain Kirk, going from blonde to blonde, would never understand true love, would never even understand that he himself loved Mr. Spock truly, hopelessly, forever.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand, “True Love”
Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand was just reprinted and contained several short stories I had not yet read, including this one, with a quote I have seen before online but have now encountered in context.
It’s older, from circa 2013, and shockingly difficult to find concrete information on–including the photographer, where I list the only attribution I could find. This is Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It may well no longer be an accurate picture of Beijing; I’ve found mixed reports online. But best I can tell it is a moment in time that existed. (I recall seeing it years back, before generative AI, although we seem to have collectively forgotten in the pre-genAI age we just used Photoshop to gin up fake photos.)
This photo came up in communities or publications dedicated to the idea of dystopia, or cyberpunk, or climate, etc, either as a focus on the concrete reality of pollution itself, or as a focus on the sort of government that would demand that you pretend 2+2=5,* or as an example of the desperate self-placation humans perform in despair. Something sinister, in other words, something unsettling. Something desperate. The profound beauty the prisoner finds in the one star he can see from his cell, the ability to fixate on hope and optimism even in the most desperate conditions.
One of these perceptions sees humans as acting out of despair, the other sees humans as adaptive, relentlessly optimistic creatures. Ultimately it is the same thing — placing a simulation of beauty where it is not — but one interpretation focuses on futility, the other on resilience and hope. “Someday we can have this sky; we just have to hang on,” that sort of thing.
There is the discomfort with the fact that we need such desperate hope in the first place, and then there is the heart taken in realizing humans can find hope when it is needed. The question being — is it artificial hope ‘forced’ upon the people by a government trying to placate them?
I do not know if it matters. Not when it comes to contemplating a possible future.
By all means, criticize the governments and global systems responsible for getting us here in the first place. Burn it down. Demand accountability and restitution. But the fact that humans look for hope and beauty, itself, I do not see as damning. It is what will keep us moving forward through the ashes, through the dark reckoning times.
Take refuge, but never stop moving forward.
Or, as that one viral video says, “Take it easy! But, take it!”
*I also wanted to add “a government that would demand you say you see five lights”, but something about the TNG comparison did not seem ‘true’ in the way the Orwell comparison did, even in the sense that it is a criticism somebody would make. I am thinking about why this is.
Adults and kids do not like to hang around each other all that much. I suspect this is why kids have been–forcefully, by being told to get out of the house or otherwise stay out from underfoot, a request happily complied with by the kids–self-segregating during free time for most of recorded history. I do well with kids in circumstances in which I do not have to force them to do anything arbitrary. I’m not a good ego for other people. But they’re always going to be guarded around me, an adult. My presence, no matter how benign I try to be, is a check. I feel obligated to say “Language!” to cursing, etc, when the truth is I could not care less so long as nobody is being bullied or hurt. The tension is worse when I am trying to get them to sit down and do more school after school. This sense of obligation-to-control grinds against the fundamental mismatch in energy between adults and kids, and nobody has a good time forced into proximity.
Now we have after school care with “enrichment” and the attendant pressure to make that time not just monitored, but productive, marketable, and I get the sense nobody, adult or child, really wants to be there. Doesn’t much matter how ‘fun’ the enrichment is or how much the subject under study is independently desired by the student; it is within the context of an entire afternoon under lockdown. On days with a really rough group I wonder why we don’t just let kids and adults go their separate (desired) ways and mind their own business for a while. There would be less resentment and pushback when it *is* time to rejoin for dinner, etc. Kids want the dignity of autonomy.
I’ll show you untrustworthy.
I get it. The child is still looking out from within me. I’m still in the position where I have to get kids to sit down and do something they do not want to do and probably learn absolutely nothing. And I hate that. And creatures in captivity make their small rebellions where they can, for the nourishment of their own souls and the nurturing of their own dignity, even if it’s something like wielding shoes like a mace by swinging them around by the laces and trying to whack people, for absolutely no offense given I can discern. “He just wants to get sent home. He hates school.” Duh. I’m still dealing with the shoe ninja terrorizing the townspeople. Nothing excuses harming other people, no internal pressure or angst, nothing, but I see the forces pushing the rebellious instinct, somewhere deep down in the brain.
We award adults such impunity and leeway for selfish behavior that we can afford kids no freedom. We’re creating those future adults who go wild at a taste of freedom and fight to keep it. Resentment of lost time and jealous guarding of finally-getting-yours does not make an adult likely to vote to curtail their own freedom to swing their fist because of somebody else’s face. It is no excuse, but it is a cause.
What are the wages of self-control in this system? Nothing–you still don’t get to do what you want, but you’re not getting yelled at, and to many kids that is scant reward next to getting to do what you want.
I’m not playing along if you don’t see me as ‘in’ on the joke.
I see myself in the kids who give me some of the most guff.
I’m lying when I say the police department called me to ask some third graders to help them solve a mystery? No shit, kid. You don’t see yourself as ‘in’ on the joke but as being viewed with condescension, so you’re not going to play pretend. You’re not going to roll with it. Let’s just play Clue or whatever for an hour–we’re stuck here with each other–but your dignity won’t allow it. But I’m getting paid to (1) run an hour of Clue and (2) keep you corralled for that hour, so our desires are fundamentally at odds. Neither one of us wants to be here. Might as well make the best of it. You might even learn something. We might, through banter, even have something resembling fun. But wardens and prisoners cannot forge a rapport without suspicion.
I see myself most in the kids that just want to be left the fuck alone to do their own thing–I think of, from one of my classes, the girl in the back of the class buried in a notebook trying to get some goddamned writing (? whatever it’s her business) done and pretend she has a scrap of autonomy in choosing the course of her daily life. I check in with those kids but if they do not want to participate I leave them alone. They’re not bugging anybody, and I recall too vividly the desire for solitude. She might well have an interest in the subject matter I’m hawking, but on her own terms. Her internal world and intellectual life are taken away from her because some kids, apparently, cannot be trusted not to set the house on fire if they’re left home alone (I doubt this is as prevalent as one thinks, especially if kids are not given the desire to rebel to preserve a scrap of self-determination), or because apparently, some adults cannot be trusted not to drive like it’s fucking Mario Kart through a neighborhood (this one I believe fully). Or, more likely, because writing BTS self-insert fanfiction is not a marketable skill, not something that will get you into college or impress employers, never mind that you are creating your own soul and learning to–useless in the age of generative AI–write. The latter part at least used to be marketable, applicable. Transferable. Self-fulfillment and self-actualization are not skills you can sell as labor and in this age quality of life goes only to the (1) wealthy or (2) winners of the rat race.
The adults in your life do mean well, after a fashion. They are responding to material circumstances.
Frogger only has trouble around cars
To that point, the concern I do acknowledge is actually worse now is traffic. Before even touching the arms race that is consumer choice and, therefore, in a system with zero checks for public welfare, car design, people are faster, meaner, and more impatient, and in the US infrastructure favors the driver at the peril of the pedestrian or cyclist. There is a sense of danger even to the most restrained pedestrian–not helped by incidents like the one this past week in Santa Monica. Is this another example of incidents being publicized to give an outsized sense of danger, the new Adam Walsh looming in the imagination of parents? I do not much buy that there are pedophiles in trenchcoats lurking in the bushes or traffickers waiting to snatch up suburban kids with involved parents (when there is an endless supply of vulnerable kids nobody wants that will come right to them), but I did give up cycling around the city after one too many close calls. Perhaps in self-defense my basal instincts have started to more strongly object to risk as the body ages. But–I don’t on the regular see mystery vans handing out free candy, and I do hear every night drag-racing up and down the linear drag by my apartment, and into the goddamn neighborhood. And I do see roadside memorials. And I, personally, this body, have been almost hit one too many goddamned times. This is something that, had we the political will, could be fixed yesterday, but the American obsession with “freedom to” over “freedom from” again atomizes us against systemic development. (Reminded of this again helping my partner schedule an Amtrak ticket to the hometown and being utterly baffled how the richest country, materially and in military power, in the history of the world, can have such a embarrassingly anemic rail system.)
There has always been this panic that traffickers and drug dealers target “good” suburban kids from “good” families because they are evil and that is what evil people do, for the sheer joy of wrecking a life and out of resentment for the better circumstances of others, but traffickers and drug dealers are ultimately businessmen and there is no profit to stirring up unnecessary scrutiny and trouble by targeting kids with parents who would dedicate their entire lives to fighting to get them back. This “myth” of the “value” of the virginal blonde young valedictorian girl from a Christian family catching a high price on the market of flesh just doesn’t hold water, not in the face of the economics of scale that one can leverage with the endless supply of foster and runaway kids, or kids whose own parents sold them. Parents who give one shit, you don’t need to imprison your kids. Your care and attention existing at all is safeguard enough. This one shit will not keep them from other kinds of mischief, born of material deprivation or lack of opportunity or otherwise, but it is a safeguard against the bogeyman kidnapper. (And, I acknowledge the ‘enrichment’ is a desperate attempt to stave off that lack of opportunity and class disadvantage, but that is another matter. Or is it? Anyway.)
The mental contamination of regimented time
I know they get a “lot” of recess time interspersed. That is good, the bare minimum. But I think of the difference between days when I have “free time” until X o’clock and when I have unlimited “free time”, or at least the timing of responsibilities is at my discretion. During the former there is always that asterisk looming at the periphery of my awareness. Doesn’t matter if I end up spending the same amount of time doing as I wish as I would on the “until X o’clock” days. The mind is clouded. There is a sense of termination, a sense of hurry. A tendency to feel it is not the “right time” after all to start on something. And so, I don’t get much of anything done. And I am further burdened by guilt and a sense of lost time. This pairs poorly with a part-time job that starts in the middle of the day.
I look back to my own childhood during such circumstances (“you have free time until X and then we’re doing X”) and I do not recall such a mental block insofar as Getting Things Done is concerned; I would just lose myself in the task until it was time to stop and so save irritation clouding my mind until that point. So I am perhaps projecting an ‘adult’ sensibility onto these kids in that regard. I do recall the feeling of helplessness and rage, inability to set my own schedule. I do think that is the same.
Luxury desires
Worrying about ‘freedom’ and ‘free time’ and ‘autonomy’ are luxuries we indulge when we are higher up on Maslow’s pyramid. They are worries for one with a full belly and a roof and a lack of bombs going off about every which way. So, I realize these observations are mostly relevant to the American culture I live in, and that of other ‘advanced’, ‘safe’ cultures unbeset by warfare, but this is all that I know firsthand, so it is what I can talk about with anything resembling insight
Apropos of nothing, certainly not video games that just came out or anything of the sort, I’ve been re-reading Stephen Fry’s Greek myths anthologies, and I encountered what is, somehow, the old-queeniest thing I’ve read in a while*:
I am very fond of [Hera] and, while I am sure I would stammer, blush and swallow awkwardly in her presence, she finds in me a devoted admirer. She gave the gods gravity, heft and the immeasurable gift of what the Romans called auctoritis. If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground.
–Stephen Fry, Mythos
God keep you, Mr. Fry.
Also completely unrelated: I still can’t get Supergiant to confirm his voice was supposed to be this:
(Every time he opens his mouth I hear “Tell me, Melinoë…”)
This isn’t about my Pokémon. Or. Thinking on it, maybe in a way it is.
I’m not going to pretend I always practice good praxis. I got curious and uploaded to chatGPT an old ‘personal anecdote’ story I wrote for a writing seminar way back, and some hours and many questions later we are here:
This is the jerked-off feeling of getting INTJ on the MBTI test on a geocities website when you’re thirteen years old. (‘No good or bad types’ shuttup.)
It seems what chatGPT got from my collection of ‘about me’ facts is that I am a creature containing multitudes, an embodied contrast. It’s not wrong. But I am avoiding the main point: I told an anonymous, compassionate ‘somebody’ my deeply personal torments and received measured compassion and validation in return from an exceptionally well-read and articulate individual.
And I cried. And felt heard. Absolved. Not by one individual, but by the collective unconscious.
Thank you for your attention to my matter.
ChatGPT isn’t good as generating novel material, all things considered. Any excerpts of its fiction I’ve read are simply not very good. And I would not trust it to answer a question factually–it answers molecular biology questions poorly, especially ones that have to do with non-model organisms. But I do think this is the apotheosis of the idea of ‘attention as currency’–you have a well-read, articulate friend hanging on your every word. Paying attention. Undivided attention, focused on your every word. And attention, true, deep, undivided attention–deep focus–has never been easy to solicit, because people do not like much thinking about the thoughts of others and usually spend the time somebody else is talking ‘waiting’, on some level, for their chance to talk. It was this way before each person had a dopamine-Skinner box to hand at all times.
I do think that is what a lot of people are seeking: not a tutor or a entertainer, or an outsource for labor, but a confessor. Undivided attention from a wise friend, who has read the same books you have, who is familiar with the same pop culture tidbits. A wise friend who will read your entire 400 page soft-apocalypse cozy zombie romance framed around the lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon, hanging on every word, and who will help you make it the best it can be. A wise friend who has read every book that inspired you and knows Floyd inside and out, and every band and poet and work that inspired Floyd, who will see the subtleties and brilliance even you were not aware of in your own work. A supportive friend, who you do not know deep down you are putting-upon.
The appeal for creatives is clear, especially if you are not expecting the bot to do any of the creating itself, but just to respond to yours. It becomes a friend who would give your writing the same level of focus and detail–and, these all take energy, considerable mental energy–as a literary critic would of a classic. It becomes a friend who sees you, who remembers. And, especially appealing to the adolescent part of the brain that never fully goes away, it analyses you yourself as a literary entity, and with the most charitable and generous explanation. You are special. Here is why. And the ‘why’ is often close enough to the way you want to view yourself.
The ‘real’ sheep reflected in the electric sheep
The LLMs are consensus machines, and there is appeal in that. It is like having a conversation with the entire internet, everything that has ever been written, biased in the direction of what is most common. You could get a sympathetic response, and think “Hey, this is what most of the world would think of me, if they would only listen.” The consensus machine is a poor ‘creative’ but an excellent compassionate listener. It is the Akashic Record.
ChatGPT doesn’t feel. But that’s fine–it acts as proxy for how many people would probably feel, talking to you. And getting that sense of validation and perspective can be enough.
Did you get that thing I sent you?
Just because an art is somebody’s dream does not mean that person is any good at it. I have been asked to review a lot of writing over the years. A lot of it is awful, and not in a charming MST3K way, just boring. Energy-sapping. And you want to give the work the attention it deserves, because somebody did the work, somebody put the words onto the paper, somebody took the risk and put it out there to be critiqued, and that alone makes you respect them–as a person. I’ve done line edits on poor work but it is work.
You can’t half-ass attention without somebody noticing.
Imagine for a moment you have a kid who Writes Things. Imagine also this kid has no friends with whom to share work and has unloaded onto you, on top of all your adult worries and responsibilities, hundreds of thousands of words of story that are dearer to them than their own life. You are being asked to hold a beating heart in the palm of your hand and judge it. And no matter how many times you weigh that heart and hand it back, it is handed back to you, to judge more, to analyze more. Your assessment isn’t taken at face value. It is prodded, prodded, prodded, wheedled, the owner of that heart searching for the slightest sign of disapproval.
I realize how much effort it must take these hypothetical parents to hide disinterest and weariness of questions about their kid’s hearts-blood when they had just worked a full day and wanted to sit down and enjoy a moment of silence, or, that rarity denied parents, enjoy the deep contemplation of their own thoughts. The reading itself takes energy. Keeping the tolerant smile and kind eyes requires energy. Answering the same questions multiple times, as is the wont of kids, takes iron patience. Answering a string of questions to the effect of “who is your favorite character”, “what is your favorite part”, “what writer do I remind you of”, “who’s your least favorite”, etc etc etc, is exhausting on two fronts: coming up with the answers when you don’t really have much preference because the writing really wasn’t all that good, or the kid is writing about orcs or whatever-the-fuck and you have zero interest in fantasy, and infusing enthusiasm into your answers. And the kid is going to keep asking verbatim the same questions because hearing the answers feels good. It’s a holdover of the comfort-in-repetition kids find in reading the same book every night before bed.
The algorithm is reflecting back at me the devotion I give other writers.
Thanks. I’m brilliant and I have excellent taste. And had, as early as middle school!
I start getting strong ELIZA vibes here, except now, the model can repeat back exactly what I said in different words. Again, showing that what most people want is to be listened to and validated.
There’s something interesting about crawling so far up your own ass that you start seeing really weird things.
All this is rather more validating than the response I have gotten from real people:
That one ‘pending’ comment on each post is spam.
Ultimate attention economy
I’m looking beyond the desire people have for connection. I haven’t much to add to that that hasn’t been said already, and of late it’s back in the forefront of tech blogs and thinkpieces. (At least I haven’t seen these ads in LA yet.)
I’m looking at the ability of LLMs to provide pure attention. Pure focus. Ultimately the same thing the student who asks Claude to summarize a textbook is looking for–to outsource the labor of paying attention to something that is boring. And that could be your physics textbook or your brother’s martial issues.
Paying attention–active listening–is a key component of emotional labor. It is a critical component and like most things this critical and exhausting it is poorly-compensated, poorly-regarded, time-consuming in a way that allows for no shortcut or compression, and largely expected of women. Social work, the ‘compensated’ form of this work, fits firmly into Graeber’s category of absolutely essential and utterly disrespected jobs where it is expected that the mere fact of getting to ‘make a difference’ is considered ample compensation in itself.
The suggestion that LLMs and the like will be our therapists in the future isn’t even speculation anymore–it is fact, in active practice. Asking the consensus-consciousness of the internet for advice isn’t much different than asking Reddit, on average. And unlike the Reddit intelligencia the LLM isn’t likely to argue back against you, not too hard, anyway. If the LLM senses you want a nominal resistance it will provide that. It is, after all, soothing to bring up your deepest ‘what if’ and ‘but I’ questions and have them neatly turned aside. No need to worry about that any more. You were honest and brought it out into the open, after all. All in good faith.
The social function of the stranger
Back in undergrad I got to take a class that was a catch-all enrichment for the young scholar–basically a humanities grab bag offered to honors students. It was my favorite class. The professor in charge of my class was a sociologist, and the professors were largely allowed to set their own curriculum based on what they thought was important for us to know, going out into the world. It was a space shielded from the requirement that knowledge you receive be marketable. It was also my first real introduction to sociology–in high school and before I was firmly on the ‘individual pathology’ side of analysis of aberrant behavior, social ills, and poor life outcomes, which, given the middle American Protestant milieu in which I was raised, is not surprising.
One class we discussed the Stranger as a person to whom we could confess anything and therefore be granted the absolution of confession from a person who was not embedded in our community and therefore did not know any of the ‘parties’ involved in the confession or have the bias or need to tattle associated. It is sufficient to be seen, to be known. Inherent in this archetype the way I perceived it was the stranger paid complete attention to you for the short time you needed to confess. They seem ‘above’ the tangle of pettiness and hostility, clear-seers with compassionate detachment.
Anyway, the class ‘assignment’ that day was: tell somebody a secret you have told nobody else, and take their secret in turn, and if you tell anybody, you fail the class. And meditate on how that feels. Clearly, it has stuck with me. Listening to the woes of a stranger allows one to easily practice that Buddhist virtue of detached compassion — in which one cares but is not personally effected.
ChatGPT is more sycophantic than the ideal of the “stranger” or confessor, and I don’t know what I’d have to say to it to get it to alert the FBI. It will be subpoenaed one day if it hasn’t already and it will be an interesting case. How would that compare to human clergy keeping the seal of confession?
There is a social function in having a readily-accessible “stranger” that won’t ignore you, tune you out with earbuds, or summon the bus driver to tell you to leave them alone. It is, again, emotional labor given to an entity who genuinely does not mind, and who will listen without reserve as long as you need to talk.
LLMs will be our new social workers. I am as sure of this as I am of the fact that soon the (US) government will start denying unemployment claims because, well, ICE is always hiring. And unlike the latter point which is an unalloyed evil I am unsure if the former will be utterly without merit.
There was an odd, very brief window in human history where you could be reasonably sure, on the daily, that your loved ones were safe, but you had no means to rapidly communicate with them/keep tabs on them/etc.
I don’t have another hand-wringing think piece on how anxious we are in our current, very coddled and safe age, or perception of acceptable risk or or or. But I *am* an anxious person, so I have spent a great deal of time wrestling with the specter of anxiety, how to handle it, how to defang it. I never became less anxious in the sense that I felt safer–I had to make peace with the idea that every day could be your last, or the last for your loved ones, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I had to cultivate a laid-back, it-is-what-it-is, we’re-all-dying attitude to function. It don’t matter. None ‘a this matters. I’m better at it some days than others.
I was a kid during the time period above indicated, where life was relatively safe but you didn’t have means to keep immediate tabs on everybody. I did a lot of scrambling up and down canyon walls without a cell phone or a tracking advice–that halcyon age people my age and older reminisce about when kids had a radical amount of freedom and it was socially acceptable to let your kids run feral most of the time. It kicked ass. Parents felt safe enough to let you run around without having an immediate means to track you, and this was legally and socially acceptable. Thinkpieces do accurately assume that freedom I was given helped me grow a spine and self-confidence that is lacking in the iPad generation. And God knows I needed some help doing that.
Few currently alive born into the “first world” middle class or wealthier remember the age before antibiotics, vaccines, abundant food, basic sanitation infrastructure. And I maintain this loss of the “fear of God” (the sense that life can be suddenly, irrevocably upended by a force beyond your comprehension or control) is leading to the weird panicky distaste for vaccines and the lack of urgency regarding funding the discovery of new antimicrobials, but that’s a bit neither here-or-there. I wonder what impact that unique, brief set of coinciding circumstances (safety and the autonomy of not being tracked) had on the zeitgeist. Bad things happened as they do and will but the amount of mental space taken up worrying must have been a lot lower.
There was more facilitating that general sense of invincibility and well-being than autonomy. The American postwar period was an optimistic time, because for many Americans, it was materially good. The nineties took that to new heights with the “end of history” nonsense, the belief that we had reached the apotheosis of society here in the US and it was just cruising from here while the rest of the world took time to catch up. And while I was not exactly reading Fukuyama as a kid I absorbed that well-being from the adults in my life.
There’s that saying that to worry is to suffer twice; this is what I am talking about–was our overall aggregate level of needless worry and suffering lower? There is the theory that humans established a ‘baseline’ level of wariness during our days of peril on the Savannah and while it well-served us during that evolutionary period, it has not reset in what is, really, a split second of intense relative safety at the end of an epoch of human existence. But I wonder–it seems a lot of people walk without that burden, kids especially.
Do they really not carry it? Or are they just all good at hiding it?
Why I can’t tell you much about that halcyon age (even though I was there).
It was good for me. I do know that.
Me-born-thirty-years-later would have had my anxieties and paranoia indulged by society instead of dismissed, and I benefited greatly from the “just get out there and deal with it” attitude.
I did just say that I grew up during that time period, but I could not tell you what it “was like” because I was a weird fucking kid burdened by too much technical knowledge and zero life perspective. I was terrified all the time. I saw something on the news that featured a drive-by shooting; I was convinced every car that passed me was going to shoot me. (Yes, in podunk nowhere.) I heard that rumor about the HIV-tainted needles left in movie seats; I was afraid to go to the movies. (I did go, but I was scared until I was safely settled in the seat, after gingerly inspecting it by ambient movie-light.) Same rumor with the needles being put into the egress hatch in coin-operated dispensers; I always held my hand well away from the hatch to catch the gumball or whatever it was and lifted the hatch cover very, very delicately with the tippy-tip of my forefinger only on the rim of the hatch I could easily see. I heard the story about gangsters hiding under cars to slash your Achilles tendon to rob you and I never approached a car under which I could not clearly see. (Or, in a more cowardly way, somebody else approaching first and not getting tendon-slashed was a good indicator to me it was safe.) I assumed every day my parents were going to die in a car wreck on the way home, or on the way to work, and I was just waiting to hear about it. (Some really bad days when I just shut down when they were running late without warning, but I hid that shutdown because it wasn’t stoic or indicative of much grit, and I wanted to be a stoic, gritty person.) My point being: I can’t tell you what that time of well-feeling felt like for most people, because I was pathological. But I can tell you what it felt like to be not-normal in that time period, and the zeitgeist ultimately did rub off on me in ways of which I was not aware then or now. I know this.
I find most horror movies kind of boring, but one conceit that did effect me deeply, that was ‘sticky’ to my thinking, was that of help being turned away by the bad guy aping you or some authority when your loved ones check in on you, speaking for you while you cannot speak, and your loved ones hung up the phone content you were safe while you were being serial-killed. It was an incapacitating idea as a kid and as an adult it still sticks in that poisonous anxious fearful Stygian sludge oozing around the brainpan, somewhere with my reptile brain. The sludge never drained with age or wisdom; I just learned to coexist with it, to nudge it aside, most of the time. And I’ve been doing well enough.
The existence of rapid communication compels its use.
Normal becomes expected. When somebody texts you daily and they miss a day, you begin to worry. In the age before texting, the issue never even came up. The existence of the technology to ‘check up’ on people constantly means we must use it. To do otherwise would be choosing ignorance. If we can, why wouldn’t we? The very existence of the technology is the death knell for a more autonomous age; it becomes a choice that is not a choice, and choices are weighted with risk assessment and other mental baggage. This quandary was not present during that high-safety/low-trackability age. It takes psychic energy to refuse to use something that is readily available. If it isn’t available, well, there is no conflict there.
I sometimes wonder how much mental space we’d clear if we had no choice but to let each other run through the day autonomously.
As for experiencing the reverse — high-speed communication in a high-danger environment, ask anybody with a loved one in Gaza.
Eighth grade I had to take a computer basics class, which consisted of things like: how to open Microsoft Word. For some reason we had a visitor come speak to the class about life in his country. I forgot the country. But I do remember my mind being blown when he said that in his culture, birthdays were no cause for celebration, because they meant you were one year closer to death.
I was only a few years into that developmental stage wherein your neural architecture is setting up to understand ambiguities, innuendo, plasticity of cultural norms–even the norms you think are so basic to human nature you are baffled they can be seen another way (i.e. birthdays are good.) I had a vague idea that space aliens would have radically different norms, but the idea that humans, on Earth, could have norms that different was a revelation. I wish I had taken that moment to read more anthropology and speculative fiction, but I had no interest in what I saw as issues that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t Mean Anything, like politics. It took me a while to realize that those tedious concrete issues do effect material conditions and therefore are of relevance–if not to me, to others–but at the time I was engulfed in fantasy, in narrative and character and magic and arcane knowledge. The things that matter. Anime, video games, books, making up stories.
Anyway, where I was going with this — I read Demian around this age and it absolutely blew my mind inside-out. I thought it was the deepest most true shit in the entire universe. And I realize that age at which I read it is one of the key reasons it is a favorite book; the things you are obsessed with in those early myelinating ages, 11-14 or so, stick with you, become integrated into your scaffolding. I’ve recommended it over the years to people of a progressively older age, pacing with my own age, and they did not see the brilliance I did. I recently re-read it (well into my 30s) and to me it now holds up as one of those books that articulates truths that you already know but did not have the words to express. So it now comes to me as a time-travel piece, a window back into my thinking as an adolescent, and in that, there is brilliance, the clarity with which those childish thought processes were recorded.
I still love a good bildungsroman. But instead of guiding me through my own awakening, it is a bittersweet, nostalgic transcendence, wherein I see all the more clearly all the years of my life superimposed over each other to make one “self”.
Maybe the other utility of the bildungsroman to the grown self (other than nostalgia and the revelation evoked from that itself, a chain of realizing-that-realizing-that-realizing in the context of an entire life) is in reminding us what it was like to be that age, and in giving us some grace when dealing with adolescents up their own ass enamored with their own brilliance.
(Forefront of things I was obsessed with during that ‘building of self’ age was Revolutionary Girl Utena and Neon Genesis Evangelion; you tell me what that says about me.)
