I’ve tried to write in the past about a very real fear I have of the ‘second’ death. That’s the one when your name is said for the very last time, and no one ever says it again. It makes my skin crawl in a way the first physical death doesn’t seem to; I can understand the physical, but the metaphysical creeps me out.
The last time I put these thoughts into words, AI was at the level of a neat old parrot, repeating things back to us in a way that seemed somewhat intelligent. Now though, I believe we’re at the point where everyone must make conscious decisions about how long we can realistically expect to participate meaningfully to progress.
What does it mean to matter, if at some point all of what made us matter is synthesised and can be echoed at high fidelity through a machine?
Recently, the New York Times podcast The Daily had on Steven Strogatz, a Mathematician at Cornell University for a conversation about what it means when AI succeeds at solving your purpose in life, and not just your ‘job’. He describes a student of his at a recent town hall asking:
“What’s the point? If the AI can do math better than any human being, sure I can sit there and learn from it; but I want to discover things, too.”
He gets into a really beautiful interpretation of the book of Ecclesiastes from the Bible, and it’s worth a listen. He waxes, he wanes, he cries - it’s really sweet. Essentially though, he speaks to the point that to outsource the production of pure results, without requiring the uniquely human experience of curiosity, and passion, and failure, then our lives are in vain. What else is there to conclude?
Metaphysically, we need to understand ourselves. It’s no longer economically viable to look outside ourselves to understand systems or problems, we must look inside and explore who we are in our bones, and what it feels like to exist, outside of our logical minds.
‘Taste’ was the big buzzword earlier this year, as if somehow fostering the ability to interpret ‘what good looks like’ was going to separate us from the machines. I don’t believe that. We can solve for taste as long as it has some semblance of a defined rule set, however complex. What we can’t solve for programmatically is what it feels like to have a friend die. When there’s frost on the outside of a tent, and you feel alone and cold, but then your loved one breathes out and everything feels okay again. Or how you just think of your mom, and then she calls you. We carry all of these things with us and bleed it into every decision we make, wether we consciously know it or not. However absolutely insane it sounds, I want a photo that I take to include all of me. It must, otherwise, what was the point of me.
In the book ‘Forces in Motion’, the artist Anthony Braxton was asked about responding to his critics, to which he replied:
“I’m not interested in that, it’s not my purpose. I determine my own variables and my own value systems, based on the route of my life; they’re not about matching up to someone else’s expectations.”
And I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently, because the AIs exist right now explicitly to match up to our expectations. Anthony composed music that cannot be physically played - he intended it to be used for harmonic communication between inter-galactic orchestras that don’t exist yet. He had no expectations of it ever being played, but it was born from the relentless pursuit of realising his own potential. He had a mission, and the mission gave purpose and meaning to the work. We care and are still talking about him now because of how much he cared to leave something of what he understood about himself behind.
So what can I do? What can I do, living now, with the time I have left, to make something that matters. Literally please if someone knows, ping me on slack.
I think an initial part of the answer can be found in ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg. She discusses how she teaches younger students to turn off their logical brain that says 1 + 1 = 2.
“Open up to the possibility that 1 + 1 can equal a Mercedes Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell me your autobiography of facts, such as ‘I am a boy. I am in sixth grade. I have a mom and dad.’ Tell me who you really are. ‘I am the frost on the window, the cry of a wolf, a thin blade of grass.”
We need to practically understand the being-ness of who we are, and yes I do mean to use ‘practical’ in the literal sense. On an interactivity level, what does it mean to represent love into a photograph. What do you know of love, how does love make you feel? And hate, that’s maybe easier to answer first, if you were to hate something what would it feel like to you? If your hate had a colour, what would that be? If how you interpret the sense of desire had a physical roundness, how round would it be? Rothko, the abstract expressionist painter, was interested in expressing human emotions in colour and scale. He tapped into something so primal, that people continue to break down crying in front of his paintings.
The other week, I was discussing with a colleague that the question of wether or not we’ll be able to distinguish between human writing and AI writing in the near future - we can extrapolate that out to any art form; painting, photography, illustration, which have all been encroached upon by AI. I said I think that’ll largely depend on how we (the collective human ‘we’) handle the question of ‘should we allow computers to make mistakes’. Although I need to make the distinction here between a ‘hallucination’ and a ‘mistake’ - we make the mistake of trusting a hallucination, the computer doesn’t make a mistake by it’s 0 and 1s nature, at least in my understanding.
Anyway,it got me thinking again about what happens at the intersection of human ambition and the ability make mistakes. Again in ‘Writing Down the Bones’, the author shares poems from a compilation collected from the Norhaven residence for women with intellectual disabilities. The women were never indoctrinated with proper English-language syntax, and are therefore full of wonderful surprises. I’ll share one below because it affected me deeply, I think it’s imagery is stunning.
The ability to surprise one another feels intrinsic to our memories of others, it means that a person was willing enough to expose who they are in that moment for the effort of connection, or a communication of ideas. Every risk and mistake builds towards a beautiful reflection of our lived experience, and the best of who we remember were able to use those experiences to help us better understand ourselves. On the opposite spectrum, I close a terminal window and I feel nothing. Bye! See ya pal, thanks for the code, you’re dead to me and I’ll never think of you again.
Two things then, at the end of all of this, that I’m going to be carrying with me into the next several months and years:
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Introspection before output. Self-awareness must be tangible in whatever I photograph and share.
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Shift from ‘presenting what I do’, towards ‘expressing my desire of what can be’. A preventative medicine towards delaying the second death.
Maple Leaf
by Betty Freeman
That I dream the lady does to be young
and to be in her pretty red Christmas ball.
Her dress looks beautiful like a swan.
The swan floats with his thin white feathers
when his soft snow head
floats to be like snow again.
Then I like to be a woman like the one,
to be with a long wing.
Editors’ Note: I couldn’t figure out how to fit these two references in here, so I’ll just shout out two TV shows that have been instrumental to get me thinking about purpose in a technological age. First, ‘Pantheon’, about digital life after death and if a digital facsimile of a person is ‘alive’. Second, ‘Pluto’, about a world that asks the question if it’s possible to be super-intelligent without the capacity to make mistakes.