Now We Wait
Die Träume sind überhaupt nicht frei
Conversations with the New Siri
Killing Google:
I asked Siri to locate the Ramparts magazine article that included a reference to sociologists from Michigan State University working with the CIA on the South Vietnamese Strategic Hamlet program. Two minutes later I’d downloaded the full article to my personal research archive, complete with a full color image of the cover of the April, 1966 issue of Ramparts which had contained the article.
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In the summer of 1989 I took my 14 year-old daughter on a weekend trip to Los Angeles. She was interested in filmmaking at the time, so I’d worked up a list of some of the locations where scenes in the movies she’d seen had been shot, and promised to show her both how they looked in real life, and why they’d been chosen for some of their movie transformations. Blade Runner’s tour de force conversion of the Bradbury was high on that list.
Although according to my sources the Bradbury was supposed to be open the morning we visited, it turned out when we got there that it was locked up tight. When I rattled the entrance door in frustration, a security guard came, opened the door, and explained that a Janet Jackson music video had just been filmed there the night before, and the lobby was still full of equipment.
I begged him as only a father can to let my daughter have a short peek at the interior, so he kindly let us stand just inside the door for a couple of minutes. Sure enough, the lobby was still full of metal scaffolding, but the elevator cages, the wrought iron and glazed tilework, the critical full-width skylight were visible enough to compare it with how it had appeared in the film. With our job done, more or less, and after a brief exploration of the façade of the Million Dollar theater across the street, we left Broadway and downtown to pursue the next attraction on the list.
I’ve long suspected that the video in question was Rhythm Nation. Although online searches in the late 90s had seemed to confirm it, hardly any details were forthcoming at the time. When the question popped into my mind again a couple of day ago, though, I thought, Why not ask Siri? The answer from Siri was a detailed production history of Jackson’s album Rhythm Nation 1814, including confirmation that the title video was at least partially filmed in the Bradbury. When I asked the followup question: “On what date was the sequence in the Bradbury building filmed?” I got this answer:
“While the exact date for the Bradbury Building sequence is not publicly documented, it was filmed as part of a 20-day shoot in August 1989 for the Rhythm Nation 1814 short film. The entire project was shot simultaneously over that 20-day period.”
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Creepy Interventions:
This unsolicited encounter with the new, let’s-pretend-I’m-a-Machine-of-Loving-Grace Siri so startled me that I deleted Siri’s pop-up message before I realized I should have preserved it in a screenshot for later consideration. Since I didn’t, the report here of what it had to say is as honest a paraphrase as I can cobbble together from memory.
Full disclosure: I’m old, and I sometimes talk to myself while working, especially when I’m attempting to solve a particularly thorny problem. I know I’m doing it when I’m doing it, I know what conventional wisdom thinks of the practice, and frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn. So don’t @ me, okay?
Anyway, I was reading a social media feed of the latest Trumpian atrocities on my iPad—anti-social media would probably more accurately describe this particular feed—when I spontaneously muttered, out loud, the following rhetorical aside: “Ah, fuck, I don’t know if I can take another minute of this shit. What the hell are we going to do?” When I looked back up at the screen I found this message in a Siri-style modal dialogue box:
“It sounds like you’re having a problem. I think I can help you—I know a number of sources that offer comfort and advice to individuals in stressful situations. Would you like me to provide you with some references?”
Mind you, I hadn’t invoked Siri, hadn’t said anything which sounded remotely like “Siri,” or “Hey, Siri,” and I’d absolutely, positively never offered even the slightest indication that I had any interest in talking to my new Apple-embedded stochastic parrot as though it were a person.
Thoroughly put off my feed, both literally and figuratively, I typed: “Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, offer any unprompted advice, information, offers of aid, nor any communications whatsoever in which you act as though you were a person.”
Siri’s response: “Okay, I won’t respond unless prompted.”
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Controlling Household Gadgets:
New Siri is slow, abysmally slow, much slower than the old, stupid Siri. Doesn’t at all like doing business with very expensive devices, like speakers and hubs, with 5 year-old chips in them, however functional they may still have been before the latest Apple system software release. With a home fully-equipped with devices that can cost in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when the whole array is addded up, do any of these pell-mell, cutting-edge tech outfits really think they’re gonna get away with obsoleting all of our pricey hardware every couple of years? If so, their bean-counters are running the risk of a very personal Armageddon as we near the end of their bosses’ industry-wide rush to digital supremacy.
Help Us Out Here, America
One of my favorite rants of all time. Every evening when the din of our ongoing political suicide abates a little, I hear it again as clearly as ever.
I Want a President
I want a dyke for president, I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president, I want someone with bad teeth
and an attitude, someone who has eatenthat nastyhospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and, been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.—Zoe Leonard, 1992
Asimov’s HVAC Service
After our interpersonal haptics that afternoon, I told Maureen that fixing her air conditioner had been a lot less complicated.
She rolled over and gave me that look of hers, tried unsuccessfully to suppress a giggle. “Y’know, R. Daneel,” she said, “sometimes you really do make me laugh.”
Surprise, Surprise….
What of the future that, as William Gibson famously told us, is already here, but is also unevenly distributed?
In a cultural age characterized largely by AI and the revival of fascism, I find any number of pundits feeling out of sight for the ends of literacy, civility, and their own positions at the bottom of the funnel of cultural relevance. Sadly, they remind me that every generation produces more trumpets and sad trombones than geniuses. Here, for those unfamiliar with him, or who have forgotten what he said, is an evaluation of our present distemper by a genuine genius, one who foresaw what we’re now facing forty years before any of our present generation were even born:
Compartmentalizing of human potential by single cultures will soon be as absurd as specialism in subject or discipline has become. It is not likely that our age is more obsessional than any other, but it has become sensitively aware of the conditions and fact of obsession beyond any other age.
Marshal McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
The Foothills of the Singularity: Uphill from the Slough of Despond?*
*A response to the weirdly aggressive metaphor in Demis Hassabis’s closing statement at Google’s I/O Keynote, May 19, 2026. “When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.”
Hassabis is a Nobel prize winner, so he has to be taken seriously, but his metaphor seems a little out of place, even in the closing peroration of a two hour-long festival of Googly self-congratulation. If we’re being charitable, we could let it pass as (ir)rational exuberance, or maybe as poetry, although as poetry goes, it’s easily as obscure as some of Rilke’s most famously obscure passages. What in the world are we to make of it?
There’s no doubt at all that the products of the last decade of AI research have their virtues, and if fed enough dollars there’s no doubt that they’ll become even more virtuous over time. Generative AI, and its undeniably impressive inference engines, are already using the speed of modern computer processors and the vast stores of data digitized from centuries of accumulated human knowledge and experience to do astonishing things.
As pure tools they already surpass us in many respects, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. What I doubt is that they’ll ever make any sense as interlocutors. Certainly as things now stand stochastic parrots is the most charitable description of their simulation of human companionship. In many reported cases, especially when they’re talking to adolescents, their simulations might less charitably be described as evil psychoanalysis.
Without contesting anything Demis Hassabis has to say about the specific technical capabilities of generative AI as it exists today, and might exist at the end of its evolution, I think we ought to be extremely wary of thinking anthropomorphically about our interactions with its avatars. Even if it turns out that they someday develop a consciousness which marginally resembles our own, our two species are very likely to remain fundamentally different in intent, if not in capability. I can’t imagine us ever fully sharing a universe of discourse, and I’d be very surprised if they’ll be able to imagine it either, not unless Hassibis and his colleagues can eventually endow them with something like what we humans call good faith. (Given the capacity for deception built into current agentic models, like Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude, good faith is seemingly something the present-day progenitors of Hassibis’s post-singularity entities haven’t yet learned to value.)
Our two kinds of intelligence share little beyond a symbol system, and the machines’ use of that system is at best a truncated version of the uses we humans put it to. China Mieville, in his book about communism and communists, A Spectre, Haunting, has a passage that touches on the voodoo hidden in the heart of natural language:
Some writers in some situations may strain against rhetorical shenanigans, for example striving for the specificity of logical notation: the cluster of reasonable meanings of such texts may well thus be less diffuse than for those which, say, revel in pun and performance. But a text with one “true” meaning is a chimera. Analysis is not closure, but an attempt to discern reasonable meaning(s) close to the core of that cluster, and to contest those that range too far from it.
Every writer has some sense of this voodoo. You set down a word, you make a sentence, a paragraph, and you’re headed somewhere with it all, reasonably confident in your intent. Then, suddenly, there’s a moment, as you wrestle to bring the grammar, the syntax, and your intent into harmony, when you can see the universe of alternate meanings stretching away from the words in all directions, like rays from the sun. This can drive an essayist mad, but a poet revels in it.
If our stochastic parrots ever do achieve consciousness, and presumably come up with a voodoo of their own, I doubt it will resemble ours as closely as our AI savants think. If that is indeed where our shamelessly unreliable interlocutors are now headed, their poetry when they finally get there is very likely to be of the Vogon variety. Does that make cynicism an appropriate defense against the category error lurking somewhere in the background of our current data center mania? No, I think not. A certain skepticism, though, is surely appropriate.
Downhill From the Anthropocene*
*From a line in Jackson Browne’s song Downhill From Everywhere. The muse is as strong as ever in him.
A year and five months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, is there anyone left in the United States who hasn’t at least begun to realize just how quickly even the most stable-seeming institutions can implode, how we can wake up one morning in a world where it takes a wheelbarrowload, a truckload of familiar certainties to trade for a dozen eggs or a gallon of gasoline?
Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. We’re still on the brink of all sorts of revelations that have yet to reach the cretinous in their red hats, or the earnest in their fantasies of how all this could have been avoided if only Joe Biden had been just a little less sleepy, or Kamala Harris had been just a little more astute. The exceptions of American Exceptionalism are, it should now be clear to all but the most persistently deluded, as vulnerable to entropic processes as the divinity of the Pharoahs, the steadfastness of Roman virtus, or the persistence of sunlight on the British Empire.
Ciudad de Los Angeles
1966
The wind unfettered
in the cypress branch
the sea’s great heart
alert
in all of us
is meaningless
and noise like this
in honor of it
meaningless
So why
stand on my
cracked hillside here
pledging a smear of sun
the last gassed palms
flying over Silver Lake
allegiance
When I could
go back in and
put the coffee on
get myself ready for work?
The Ingress and Egress of It All
I’m watching NASA’s preparations for the April Fool’s Day launch of Artemis II, their first crewed circumlunar mission since Apollo 8 in 1968. My twenty-five year-old self watches with me, that long-haired, incurably hopeful New Leftist I used to be jammed into a neighbor’s living room with my then girlfriend and most of the rest of our ambivalent crew, waiting for Walter Cronkite to light up my neighbor’s 13 inch Sony TV with the confirmation that Neil Armstrong had become the first human being in history to set foot on another celestial body.
NASA representatives still talk like automatons, still use unnecessarily cryptic words/phrases like ingress and egress, capcom (capsule communicator), extravehicular activity, translunar injection. It’s all so cult-like, so pious, so oblivious to the atrocities being commited in our name elsewhere on our own celestial body, that blue marble of aspiration, the one we keep betraying. The word then was Vietnam, the word today is Iran. But never mind. For now we are watching a special civilian operation. The special military operation will have to wait until tomorrow.
The Antipersonal Assistant
My flirtation with so-called smart home technology began with internet connected cameras that allowed me to see inside my house when I was away on trips, and with locks that I could unlock remotely in case my neighbors needed access in emergencies. Maybe the memory of my mom driving my dad crazy by wondering an hour or so into every Sunday drive if she’d left the iron on is what set me up for this. Whatever it was, I found that the offer of a personal panopticon to help control the things in my life that might still be controllable was genuinely seductive, even though I’d long been aware that the things one can control in life aren’t the things that actually matter.
In any event, ten years or so into this adventure, the technology had matured to the point that relying on it to help me do things I hadn’t previously been able to do seemed quite natural. Then the daemon of generative AI sprang full-grown from Sam Altman’s brow—unbidden, unannounced, largely unfathomable—and demanded to be a full partner in the pilgrim’s progress I had up till then considered to be my private life.
Would you like me to show you what movies are on that you really want to watch? Here’s all the news I compiled for you today—I left out the things I know would upset you. I saw that you were almost out of coffee, so I ordered ten pounds of your favorite whole beans from that new place you got the push notification from last Tuesday, the one you saved in your shopping list.
No, thank you. Raped by the heralds of demented late-stage capitalism was definitely not something I wanted chiseled on my tombstone, let alone tattooed on my backside. Was there any way to avoid it, though? Well, not entirely, but there was Apple.
Apple was (and still is) almost universally considered among the technorati to be hopelessly behind in AI, particularly in the generative AI that made Alphabet’s Gemini so much smarter and more responsive than Siri, so much more competent at the agentic functions that made a personal assistant genuinely useful. Fine, I thought, investigating further, I’ll stick with Apple, then. They promise they’ll let me turn the good shepherd stuff off, and retain at least the illusion of free will.
I should have known better. I don’t think anyone has yet realized just how demeaning, yet inescapable, our dance with the agents of virtual personhood is going to be. For example:
I like to read before going to sleep, but I don’t like having to get out of bed to go turn the lights off when I’m finally ready to put away the reading and get some shuteye. Most people probably just switch off their bedside lamps, but given the built-in recessed ceiling lights that came with my house, I skip the bedside lamps and instead engage in a three-part Siri conversation with a HomePod on the other side of the room:
Siri, good night. This turns off all the lights except the lights above the bed, locks all the doors, turns off the TV and speakers in the living room if they’re still on, and checks to see that the garage door is closed.
Siri, before bed. This sets the lights above the bed to the right color temperature and brightness for reading.
Siri, bedtime. This turns the lights above the bed off.
A couple of nights ago, I mistakenly began the sequence by issuing the second request, before bed, instead of the first, good night. Siri, however, responded as though I’d actually said good night. Since the two requests don’t actually sound anything alike, I’m tempted to believe that the Siri algorithm(s) have taken note not only the content of the requests I’ve been issuing almost every night for the last few years, but also their sequence, and very helpfully did what it assumed I wanted it to do instead of what I actually asked it to do. The fact that its inference was helpful in this particular situation didn’t keep it from feeling like a scenario straight out of 1984. These are precisely the sorts of judgments that no one who values their personal autonomy wants a stochastic parrot to be making, even in support of the seemingly benign act of turning lights off and on.
Get ready folks. Unlike me, you might not have to share your bed with them, but it does look like these corporate nursemaids are going to be looking over everybody’s shoulder from now until some future Sam or Elon decides there’s more profit in thermonuclear war, desertification, or Soylent Green. Last one to the singularity is a rotten egg!