A New Kind Of Fire

When rubbing two seemingly unrelated concepts together, sometimes you get a new kind of fire.

For example, in the left hand of our contemporary muse:

Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. E in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri

The old world is dying. The new one is late in emerging. And in this half-light monsters are born.

—Antonio Gramsci, from his prison notebooks

And in the right hand:

In fact, the overwhelming impression I get from generative AI tools is that they are created by people who do not understand how to think and would prefer not to. That the developers have not walled off ethical thought here tracks with the general thoughtlessness of the entire OpenAI project.

—Elizabeth Lopatto in the Verge article, The Questions ChatGPT Shouldn’t Answer, March 5, 2025

If we rub these particular concepts together, will anything interesting really be ignited? That depends, I think, on whether or not we believe that the old world really is dying, and whether or not we also share the consensus developing among our professional optimists that the technologies we’ve begun to call artificial intelligence represent a genuine hope of resurrecting it.

If we believe that Gramsci’s prescient vision is finally being fulfilled, what monsters, exactly, should we be expecting? The resurgence of fascism and fascists is certainly the one most talked about at the moment, but the new fascism seems to me less like a genuinely possible future, and more like the twitching of a partially reanimated corpse. Vladimir Putin can rain missiles down on the Ukraine all day long, and we learn nothing. Donald Trump can rage and bluster and condemn, and still not conquer France in a month. Despite the deadly earnest of both these tyrants, Marx’s “second time as farce” has never seemed more apt.

The more interesting monsters are the tech bros of Silicon Valley, the idiot savants who modestly offer themselves up to serve as our once and future philosopher kings. They give us ChatGPT, and in their unguarded moments natter endlessly on about AGI and the singularity as though they’d just succeeded in turning lead into gold, or capturing phlogiston in a bell jar.

Never mind asking Sam Altman why, despite his boasting, we haven’t yet achieved AGI on current hardware. Ask a simpler question instead: Why don’t we yet have self-driving cars? More specifically, why don’t we have self-driving cars that can drive anywhere a human being can, in any conditions a human being can? Then ask yourself how you would train a self-driving car to handle all the varied versions of the trolley problem that are likely to occur during the millions of miles driven each day on the world’s roads.

We do know how human beings handle these situations, don’t we? If we train a car’s self-driving system in the same way human beings are trained, should we not expect equivalent results?

The answer to our first question is no, we can’t actually describe with any degree of certainty what mental processes govern human reactions in such situations. What we do know is that mind and body, under the pressure of the split-second timing often required, seem to react as an integrated unit, and rational consciousness seems to play little if any part in the decisions taken in the moment. Ethical judgments, if any are involved, appear purely instinctive in their application.

Memory doesn’t seem to record these events and our responses to them as rational progressions either. When queried at the time, what memory presents seems almost dreamlike—dominated by emotions, flashes of disjointed imagery, and often a peculiarly distorted sense of time. When queried again after a few days or weeks, however, memory will often respond with a more structured recollection. The rational mind apparently fashions a socially respectable narrative out of the mental impressions which were experienced initially as both fragmentary and chaotic. The question is whether this now recovered and reconstructed memory is data suitable for modeling future decision-making algorithms, or is instead a falsification which is more comfortable than accurate.

With such uncertainty about the answer to our first question, the answer to our second becomes considerably more complicated. If we don’t know whether or not the human reactions to an actual trolley problem are data-driven in any real sense, where should we source the data for use in training our self-driving car systems? Could we use synthetic data—a bit of vector analysis mixed with object avoidance, and a kind of abstract moral triage of possible casualties? After all, human reactions per se aren’t always anything we’d want emulated at scale, and even if our data on human factors resists rational interpretation, we already have, or can acquire, a considerable amount of synthetic data about the technical factors involved in particular outcomes.

Given enough Nvidia processors and enough electricity to power them, we could certainly construct a synthetic data approach, but could we ever really be sure that our synthetic data matched what happens in the real world in the way, and to the degree, that we expect? This might be the time to remind ourselves that neither we nor our machines are gods, nor are our machines any more likely than we are to become gods, not, at least, as long as they have to rely on us to teach them what any god worth worshipping would need to know.

I think Elizabeth Lopatto has the right of it here. Generative AI knows, in almost unimaginable historical completeness, what word is likely to come after the word that has just appeared—on the page, over the loudspeaker, in the mind, whatever—but historical is the operative word here. Every progression it assembles is a progression that has already existed somewhere in the history of human discourse. It can recombine these known progressions in new ways—in that sense, it can be a near-perfect mimic. It can talk like any of us, and when we listen to the recording after the fact, not even we ourselves can tell that we didn’t actually say what we hear coming out of the speaker. It can paint us a Hockney that not even David Hockney himself could be entirely sure was a forgery.

The problem—and in my opinion it’s a damning one—is that generative AI, at least as presently designed and implemented, can never present us with anything truly new. The claims made for successful inference algorithms at work in the latest generative AI models seem to me to be premature at best. While it may ultimately prove to be true that machines are capable of becoming independent minds in the same way that human beings do, proving it requires an assessment of all sorts of factors related to the physical and environmental differences in the development of our two species which so far remains beyond the state of the art.

Human beings still appear to me to be something quite different from so-called thinking machines—different in kind, not merely in degree. However we do it, however little we understand even at this late date how we do it, we actually can create new things—new sensations, new concepts, new experiences, new perspectives, new theories of cosmology, whatever. The jury is still out on whether our machines can learn to do the same.

If we’re worried about fascism, or indeed any form of totalitarianism that might conceivably subject our posterity to the kind of dystopian future already familiar to us from our speculative fiction, we’d do well to consider that a society based on machines that quote us back to ourselves in an endlessly generalized loop can hobble us in more subtle but just as damaging and permanent ways as the newspeak and doublethink portrayed in Orwell’s 1984. No matter how spellbinding ChatGPT and the other avatars of generative AI can be, we should never underestimate our own capabilities, nor exchange them out of convenience for the bloodless simulacrum offered us by the latest NASDAQ-certified edgelord.

The bros still seem confident that generative AI can transform itself in a single lifetime by some as yet undefined magic from a parrot into a wise and incorruptible interlocutor. If they’re right, I’ll be happy to consign this meditation to the dustbin of history myself, and to grant them and their creations the respect they’ll undoubtedly both demand. In the meantime, though, I think I’ll stick with another quote, this one by [email protected]‬ in a Mastodon thread about ChatGPT:

I don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.

What Stays in Vegas

I could hear blast door bolts slotting home behind me, but there wasn’t any use trying to pretend I’d come through before it closed. The woman standing next to the captain’s chair in the center of the hide—short hair, sand camo, half-drawn sidearm—was looking straight at me, her you gotta be fucking kidding me reaction turning lethal before either of us could blink. Except for the obvious crew at stations to my left—I counted six of them—the hide seemed to be jammed all the way to the back wall with raggedies of every age and condition, probably survivors brought down from the ruins of the Strip.

“How the hell?”

“Grepped by your portal north of the Wynn—what’s left of it anyway. You were after someone else?”

“Wasn’t us.”

“Unfunny either way. Any idea who hates us both?”

“At this point? Damned near everyone. Where’s the rest of you?”

“Name, rank, and serial number, all you get.”

The sidearm was all the way out now, the business end glowing. “Think again.”

The air around me rippled briefly like a stone tossed into a pond, and suddenly my whole crew was formed up between us, the better part of a heavy weapons squad already in full on search and destroy mode. “Hold!” I shouted, and well-trained fingers came off half a dozen triggers. “Make a hole.” Pushing a couple of nasty-looking muzzles aside, I stepped to the front. “This is the rest of us. I don’t know why we’re here. Do you?”

She shook her head slowly, the sidearm already back in its holster. “So now what?”

“I’m thinking what our betters call ‘a frank exchange of views.’”

“Works for me. Let me get these people someplace first.”

I nodded. She unshipped a handheld and tapped at it briefly. Somewhere beyond the huddled masses at the far end of the hide an airlock began to cycle. “Okay everybody, 20 at a time into the lock. Gunnery Sergeant Walker there will monitor. There’s secure shelter at the farside end of the tunnel—beds, food, water, and sanitary facilities including showers. Changes of clothing will be handed out as and when. Anyone needing medical attention or prescription meds see the corpsman on duty. We’ll get you back topside as soon as we can.”

Took a while, but eventually there were just us grunts in the captain’s hide—half hers, half mine. We signaled them to stand down while we were off sorting out our uneasy truce.

Her ready room, built for speed, not for comfort. A table with four chairs, a sitrep holo over the center that blanked as we entered. She gestured. We sat. We talked.

“You are?”

“California. 1st Armored Cav. You?”

“Texas. 415th Force Recon out of Corpus Christi. Also a handful of stray Hoosiers and Jayhawkers from that KC sigint battalion got mauled last month up around Pahrump. Some awful shit went down there. Here too. I used to fly over from home with the sigo for a show, now I hate the fucking place.”

“Not really a place anymore, though, is it? Not much left but latrines, body bags, and rubble. I figure we’re just about done here. Some papers’ll get signed, some razor wire’ll get unrolled, a few mines and flagpoles planted. Then the fuckers in charge’ll declare it a demilitarized zone, and anybody left alive’ll finally get to go back home and start over.”

“Yeah, probably got in mind going all ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ for the coastal stringers. Not this time, though, not with all the broken parts getting shipped back home to the folks.”

“So…wasn’t you grepped us?”

“Wasn’t. I been asking myself who pulled it and why, but I keep coming up with nada. If it wasn’t my people, and it wasn’t yours, who the hell else has the mooch to grep half a fucking infantry squad halfway across a city this size with most of what’s left of it still under fire? You want a beer?”

“You got beer?”

“Liberated a dozen cases of longnecks a week ago from a half-wrecked convenience store behind our perimeter. Been doling them out for good behavior, but I’ve still got a dozen or so left. So yeah, I got beer.”

“Bring it, then, and let’s see can we figure this shit out.” 

We never did figure it out. I said maybe some do-gooder NGO put us together on purpose, see if a couple of ground pounders’d make love not war. She said no fucking way, just blind luck we didn’t waste each other on sight. We were still scratching our heads at 1650, when both our handhelds started to flash. Armistice signed, all hostilities to cease at 1700. And that was that.

Around sundown, I raised one of the last two longnecks, knocked it against hers. “I hope you’re right about this time being different. Sad we have to live in hope—probably what guarantees we stay at the bottom of the foodchain where we are. Hope or no hope, I’m thinking I oughta get my people up top before reporting in. Just in case.”

She upended her bottle, drained it, slammed it down on the table next to mine. “Until the next one, then, Califa. ¡Que te vaya bien!”

Singing In The Dark Times

Twitter. After more than a decade of contented blogging, I tried it last year, and was almost immediately chased off the premises by a persistent sociopath who needed to be there far more desperately than I did. I’d been onboard long enough, though, to realize that what made Twitter valuable was its omnipresence. It saw everything everywhere all at once, and was both faster and less timid than any curated medium was at reporting what it saw. Despite its flaws, Twitter always knew what was up, and it was always eager to tell everybody about it.

Being able to eavesdrop on the entire world in real time, or as close to real time as human perception and internet data transmission allow, is intoxicating in both the good and bad senses of the term, which is undoubtedly why Twitter can sometimes appear to us as a fountain and sometimes as a cesspool, and sometimes as both at the same time. Despite attempts by management to police vile and unpleasant behavior, there has never been any credible gatekeeper on Twitter, no credentialing, certification, or approval process that couldn’t easily be circumvented. The reason for this was the sheer scale of the task. The universe of discourse on social media in general, and on Twitter in particular, was and is too large and too fast to control, even with the assistance of computer-driven algorithms. Unlike the editors of the New York Times, Jack Dorsey and his staff had no illusions about their ability to monitor, let alone enforce, cultural norms at scale. On Twitter, civilized discourse was an option, but it was never the only option. Caveat lector was the rule.

And so it was until Musk, full of who knows what except himself, decided to cast his bread upon the waters. Given that we’re only a few days into his reign, it’s hard to predict the outcome of his dalliance with any confidence, but at the moment it seems unlikely that he’ll ever find that bread again, at least not all 44 billion dollars worth of it. What the rest of us will find is even more uncertain, but I suspect that even after Musk has done working everything over from top to bottom with his libertarian hatchet, Twitter will remain pretty much what it always has been, the human comedy entire, in all its tawdry glory. It’s also a fair bet, I think, that Musk the reformer isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and it won’t be all that surprising if, in the waning days of his epiphany, he turns out not be as solvent as he thought he was either.

All that aside, what I found useful about Twitter last year is still just as useful, and I know my way around the place now. I no longer need to browse except when the mood strikes me, I’ve found a place where the sociopaths can’t get to me, and if Elon ever tires of his pet project, or surrenders it to the bankruptcy courts, I’ll still have Mastodon, or something very like it, to fall back on. Caveat lector is working out just fine for me. YMMV.

American Landscapes — II

Facing westward
I stand in the seawind.
Black water moving on the sand
matches my breathing.

I turn my back to ruins
and I walk
making my speeches over water.

Forced metals
yield insoluble salts
leaves fill their complicated needs
whenever it rains.
I leave my footprints at the waterline
and the waves come.
The sun clears the sea.

American Landscapes — I

First light
beginning clear and violent
in the East.
There is no sound.

All I carry
of the cypresses
                  the dust
                  is here
and the sunflowers
the smell of corn and horses
where I’m walking.

There are towns here too
and in them
men to pass the time.
I know them.

Over their streetlights
over their shadows and voices
quick winds and
darkness when the sun goes
nowhere any water.