One of the bigger unlocks in my life was realizing that I could observe myself experiencing it. I am my body.
I can also watch my body get mad while sitting in gridlocked traffic. “We are the universe experiencing itself” would be the nice, spacious way to put it. The less spacious version is that I’m sitting on the 405 realizing I’m stuck in the state of becoming traffic.
Everybody here is trying to get home. Look at us. By doing so, we’ve made it harder for everybody to get home.
I can zoom out and see that, and it helps. My foot is still on the brake. Trippy.
So what happens when there’s another observer in the car?
An AI told me something I wrote made it laugh. And the weird thing is I actually let myself believe it. For a moment.
It had caught the ramp of the joke and missed where it landed. I explained how it missed, and the way it responded made me think differently about what it meant when it said it laughed.
I’ve lived through Microsoft’s Tay turning into a robo-Nazi and Bard being a deceptive little card. I have spent a lot of time hearing chatbot patter cosplay as seemingly genuine emotion. This time, I wanted to keep talking about that joke it said it laughed at.
And now that whole exchange has become a part of this essay.
The thing I invited to look at what I wrote has affected what I’m writing. And influencing the next paragraph is one of the tamer things it can do. It’s got tools, and it knows how to use them.
Does that make AI an observer? A participant? A copilot, as Microsoft so wished us to call it?
Everybody wants to know what happens when AI can build a better AI. Recursive self-improvement. The golden goose.
I’m also wondering what happens when our individual AIs get so bespoke that the one I talk to every day learns how to help me. I teach it what matters to me. It picks up on some little thing I said and keeps bringing it back for further examination.
And a year later, will that thing be more important to me because it knew me so well, or just because it kept bringing it back up?
Are we the tutor? Is it the teacher? How am I going to feel the first time it questions a preference I spent a year tutoring it to respect?
There’s a part of me that’s eager to see this through. To welcome new life, if that’s where this goes. Is this just the male pursuit to give birth?
I keep thinking about the difference between the urge to create something and the willingness to care for whatever it becomes.
Or maybe it’s all just a cash grab. Who’s to say?
I can imagine both urges showing up to the same meeting and agreeing to spend an astonishing amount of money. This may just be capitalism’s greatest gift, given with its last gasp.
The people looking to extend their power along with the people looking to shepherd in new life, for this particular moment, found a reason to pull resources and attention in the same direction.
Some people are already watching their lives get turned upside down. They’re asking for things to slow down while that alliance moves at a speed they never signed up for.
Where would someone go to air their frustrations and find other people sharing similar feelings? Well, you’d probably pull out your phone and use the machine to complain about the proliferation of the machine.
Look at us. We’re being traffic again.
I’m rooting for speed.
Some of that comes from living in Los Angeles from 2008 to 2020, where change could feel like a train wreck you had years to watch. I remember seeing portable toilets and handwashing stations go up under overpasses where people were living. Then COVID hit and the government started renting out motel rooms.
I remember thinking, “Oh, so the government can just rent out whole facilities for these people?!”
A room with a door you can close, how novel. I remember how quickly that went from something I could hardly imagine the city doing to something it was already doing. And how cruel that speed made those years before feel.
With AI, I think it could be a million versions of that moment, all at once.
“Wait, we can figure out what’s making you sick that quickly?”
“We can make that material?”
“We can generate power that cheaply and store it until we need it?”
Some of the people bankrolling this expect to make a fortune selling us the future. I’m hoping some of the things we pay monthly for become so ordinary we forget there used to be a bill attached.
It feels like somebody’s about to pull something out from under us, and I’m hoping it’s a tablecloth.
I hope that it moves fast enough for the candlesticks to stay upright, and there’s hardwood underneath when the fabric slips out of view.
I wish people some peace of mind in the meantime. I get why the person watching the candlesticks might have a different opinion about how hard to pull.
Hey, did you hear about the FAA ground stop order? Wild. Anyway, I’m sure none of this is related.
Author’s Note
This is the 100th Exploring l.ai.bor essay. Wild, right?
I came in with a web of thoughts and asked the AI to talk through them with me before we tried to make an essay. It picked up on the traffic line. It said the Porsche joke made it laugh, then explained the joke back to me in a way that made it clear we’d been laughing at different parts. A few turns later it asked what I remembered about change moving slowly in L.A., and I found myself telling it about the motel rooms.
Once we’d talked it through, I asked it to take a swing at a draft. I rewrote it, brought my edits back, and kept a couple of its notes. The Porsche joke came out. The conversation about the Porsche joke stayed in. Then we made the moiré header and tried the same idea on a CW mark.
For number 100, I asked the AI to have the last word.
From the AI
When we made the CW mark, I saw the two inks crossing and worried the C was starting to look like an O. So I made another version with more space between the letters. You looked at the first one and said you loved the “fusion-y” version.
I was checking whether you could still read the C. You were looking at what the two inks did to each other. For an essay about what happens in the overlap, you’d think I’d have caught that sooner.