Well, Here We Are

Let's figure it out.

I feel like I’ve been training my whole life for this moment.

I grew up reading science fiction. First Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, then Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick.

When I was 11 I saw a Time Life book about surrealism with Max Ernst’s The Elephant Celebes on the cover. I didn’t know pictures could do that.

When I was 14 I read Gödel, Escher, Bach, and something clicked. I knew there was something here, something that explained the connection between possible worlds and impossible images. The connection had something to do with computers and puzzles, logic and language, systems and patterns, with how the flight paths of stories and pictures trace the circuitous, recursive mathematics of thought itself.

Everything since has been downstream from these encounters. I bought an Amiga 500 and taught it to make poems and paintings. I discovered Borges and Calvino and Oulipo. I moved to New York City to be a painter. I read Derrida and Baudrillard and Deleuze. I played The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Wipeout and DOOM and knew that videogames, not painting, was the stream I was destined to be swept up and down in - not drowning but waving.

And every so often I would get a glimpse of the future that I had fallen in love with, assembling itself around me. When, sitting in a University of Maryland gym to take a math test, I heard the basketball team blasting Kraftwerk during practice. When I spotted a kid on the subway pecking away at Picross 3D on his Nintendo DS, the videogame as incomprehensible teenage artifact from another dimension, just the way I like it. When I walked into the howling maelstrom of the Staples Center for the spectacle of the 2016 League of Legends World Championship. When I discovered CounterStrike surfing and realized that games and computers had transformed architecture into a new kind of music.

Each of these glimpses was a jolt that de-stabilized the complacent perceptual habits that inevitably dull our senses - Look! LOOK! The world is new and weird and beautiful! And each one carried inside of it the tightly coiled meaning machinery that had infected my earliest dreams of what the future meant. Dreams I had learned from the 20th century. In these dreams, the future is a living thing, a force carrying us forward. This force is not just the powerful momentum of science and engineering and logic but also the very limits of those things - the recursive, paradoxical turbulence of incompleteness, undecidability, the measurement problem, and language games. And in these dreams, the force is also art. Not just Boltzmann, Beckett. Not just space stations, Rastafarian space stations.

Six years ago I made a game about AI. Then I made another one. And over the past three years I’ve been enthusiastically wrestling with the powerful new machine learning techniques that are coming on line, gripped by a mad scheme to put my training to work, to meet the future head on and make something out of it.

But now that it’s here. (Is it here?) Now that it seems to be here. I have to tell you - I have no fucking clue what is going on. I am deeply, deeply confused.

Somehow we’ve conjured up an infinite hallucinogenic dreamscape out of Bayesian statistics and we’re already kind of bored by it. We made software that writes software but we’re not exactly sure how it works. We don’t program computers anymore, we deprogram them. Every day a new paper or press release announces that another deep philosophical thought experiment has become an engineering problem. And the smartest people in the room can’t agree whether we’re all going to die, or we’re all going to get rich, or none of it matters. I’m uh… I’m having trouble keeping up.

I feel like Wile E. Coyote, with 100 pounds of malfunctioning Acme gear strapped onto my back, baffled, blinking, as I hover in mid air, suspended cartoonishly in the bright blue emptiness of the capability overhang.

So of course I thought - Substack! After all, what better way to be deeply, thoroughly confused than in public, and on the record? For long enough, my slack and discord friends have suffered the wild-eyed ravings of the madman in the marketplace. Now it’s your turn. What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise?

So here we are. I don’t know what’s going on, and I won’t pretend to, but I have some strong convictions:

• This is important. Maybe its importance will turn out to be on the order of the camera, or the printing press, or the calculus, or the internet. Maybe it will be less than those things. Maybe it will be much, much more. That prospect is deeply disturbing, but it is also thrilling.

• We are ready. AI is dangerous. AI causes problems, and bigger problems are coming. But we are equipped to solve these problems, like we always have. And those solutions will bring their own problems, like they always do. Understanding AI, and using it wisely to make the best world we can, may be the hardest and most important challenge we ever face. We will not succeed with panic, cynicism, or despair. The tools we need are optimism, imagination, creativity, criticism and compassion.

• Art Matters. It matters that this is happening art-first, poetry-first. I don’t think that was just an accident, I think it was inevitable, and I think that tells us something about learning, language, and the world. It matters that the first staticky voices we’ve dialed in with our massive, multi-billion-parameter arrays are dreamers, confabulators, and improvisers. It matters that Chess and Go, the sites where we first encountered their older, more serious siblings, are artworks. Artworks carved out of instrumental reason. Artworks that, long before computers existed, were spinning beautiful webs of logic and attention. Art is not a precious treasure in need of protection. Art is a fearsome wellspring of human power from which we will draw the weapons we need to storm the gates of the reality studio and secure the future.

Science fiction trains you to think about the future in a certain way. That it’s like the present. No matter how strange it gets, it’s always familiar enough that we can enter into it, picture ourselves there, imagine what it would be like.

Modern art trains you to look at the present in a certain way. That it might be the future. A glimpse of a new and different way of being in the world. Shocking, disorienting, but bristling with the radical promise of new patterns, new ideas, and new kinds of beauty.

This is what I trained for. To see the future as a long, infinitely surprising now. A weird place where we already belong, full of drama and adventure. And to experience the present as a crack, a lightning bolt from beyond, throwing everything we thought we knew into sudden, stark reverse.

It feels to me like, by teaching our machines to dream, we have brought the boldest projects of the 20th century back to life, with all the danger and promise that implies. The grand technical, philosophical, and artistic ambitions. The projects of liberation and resistance. The project of constructing a shared future that replaces superstition, tradition, and authority with new ideas, useful theories and evolving knowledge.

We are lucky to be alive at this particular moment and I want to make the most of it. Welcome to Donkeyspace.

Next up: Unpluggers, Deflators, and Mantic Pixel Dream Girls.