Tilting at windmills

A little bit on a lot: AI, ‘The Bear,’ and guava cheesecake

Last week, I woke up earlier and finished my work quickly, so that I might have more time to explore a new route on my bike. I traveled dirt trails to a quiet bench near a new lake. I skipped a stone across the surface and watched as the shape of a person unfolded itself on the distant shore.

A hollyhock has unexpectedly pushed through the hard dirt near the front gate with more blooms to come.

I talked to my cousin who lives in a different country and was comforted by the familiarity of her voice.

From a small skylight in the ceiling, I read and watched flashes of lightning beam down onto my floor in the middle of the night.

Screeching kept distracting me from work. I thought it was a bird but then noticed the tree outside my room had grown closer to the greenhouse and scraped against the glass.

I made a guava burnt Basque cheesecake and invited friends over to try it. In the heat, beneath the locus, were strewn plates of crumbs and feet up on slatted chairs. I peered into my friends’ faces and saw a moment from college when we were all so tired from the final week of class, that we sat on the porch with our coursework, it having slid onto the ground, as we doubled over in slap-happy laughter.

Over the weekend, a painter looked out west from the backyard. He captured the broken windmill I pulled from the arms of the almond bush, its little fan missing. I moved it beneath a dead branch I meant to take down from the elm—but the birds love the branch so much that I left it. What is left of my week—the only tangible thing—is that painting.

And yet tangibility doesn’t quite capture the urgency I’ve been feeling toward my days. Maybe what I’m looking for is the tactile.

I finished reading “The MANIAC” by Benjamin Labatut, which explores John von Neumann’s contributions to game theory, programmable computers, and cellular growth—things that I cannot grasp with my hands. Labatut’s von Neumann is brilliant, destructive, prophetic, which is why a series of computers known as the MANIAC, built on von Neumann’s design principles, was named after him. Beginning in 1952, the computer ran extensive thermonuclear processes more quickly and efficiently for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The moments in which I snapped to attention were the small glimpses of von Neumann’s attempts to map human consciousness as if what goes on inside our heads is an equation or formula. Von Neumann was trying to mathematically dissect our reasons and logic, to give equation to how we make choices.

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the book “Describing Inner Experience: Proponent Meets Skeptic,” which I found myself referencing quite a few times, especially in regard to this passage:

“I asked [von Neumann] if he had finished the paper that he had been working on when he was first hospitalized—'Computing Machines and the Brain: On the Mechanisms of Thought’—a treatise that he intended for Yale’s prestigious Sillman Lectures. He had given me an early draft; in it, he concluded that the brain’s method of operation is fundamentally different from that of the computer. According to my father, all computers follow a similar architecture to the one he created for the MANIAC. It forces them to operate sequentially, a step at a time. But the human brain is very different. It is massively parallel, executing an enormous number of operations simultaneously. But that was not the aspect that puzzled him the most. He was searching for the inner logic of the brain. The ‘language’ that it used to function.”

Labatut posits that von Neumann’s contributions to the Manhattan Project were not as terrifying as his contributions to artificial intelligence.

In the same week I finished Labatut’s book, Instagram and Google announced they are partnering on search optimization. When I first opened my Instagram account sometime around 2012, it was a personal archive. It replaced the photo sharing I used to do on Facebook, and it was a place to gather friends and family. In the early days of my feed, familiar faces squinted toward a flash in pixilated abandon, and now, of course, it’s products, memes, strangers, advice, marketing—whatever you want to name it. Instagram has replaced search engines for younger generations, and now Google will be capitalizing on their habits. I’m not sure what it means for my own personal photographs, how SEO will grasp onto those small moments, the hashtags we used in the beginning of Instagram’s inception. Google has already started indexing Instagram’s content.

Not too long after MANCIAC, computers started indexing a seemingly impossible amount of data—data that we had very tactile relationships with was suddenly a tape, a number, a sequence. It’s no surprise that our photos and memories could be reduced to a number. Nils Aall Barricelli, who also makes an engaging appearance in Labatut’s book, was an early pioneer of digital life, whose ideas were essentially stolen by von Neumann. Barricelli created creatures made of codes and numbers and ran models on MANIAC, to see how they evolved. He found they behaved similarly to living organisms. Something about them makes me think that though we look for extraterrestrial life in the cosmos, it might be here with us.

What’s interesting about Labatut’s book is that he outlines a moment in time in which these mathematicians, who were also orchestrating immense destruction in the Los Alamos lab that led to the dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan, always seem to be reaching or longing for life. They are holed up somewhere, in a lab, in a room, and eventually, for von Neumann, in the Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital as he was dying of cancer. They led us closer to understanding and knowledge but they seem so far from a tactile understanding of anything. And that’s what I worry about. All those moments in my week, the building blocks of my own life, the people that make me happy, the cakes that I bake, a painting of my broken windmill, the ways in which my body moves about the world, are all real to me now, but once they become data points cannibalized by the numbers that try to imitate them, I’m not sure I will have a strong grasp on who I am. Those moments I once captured will become searchable, not in the lens of my own memory, but through Google.

If you watched the newest season of “The Bear,” it’s like in episode seven, when everyone is at Richie’s ex-wife Tiff’s wedding. The camera takes you from conversation to conversation, to uncomfortable silences, hurt feelings, and familial combustions. And then toward the end, we land on Richie’s daughter, who is hiding under a banquet table because she doesn’t want to dance with her stepfather. People take turns trying to get her out, but then they just stay. And slowly, all the imperfect Berzattos and their adopted family and coworkers accumulate under the table. They’re scrunched and close together, shoulders touching, which is what happens when you put adults in tight spaces. And then Claire tells everyone to go around and say what they’re most afraid of, and she begins by saying bees. And then it’s Richie next, and he says, “AI, specifically the singularity, but like you know, in general, just artificial intelligence.”

And it’s a bit of comic relief because Richie is probably the last person to be caught using AI. When he spends so much time agonizing over his pre-shift speeches at the restaurant, he’s not asking ChatGPT for help. But he stands for everything we might lose—that messiness and community-ness, the banquet table. Tactile implies engagement, it implies touching one another.

The last part of Labatut’s book is about Go master Lee Seedol playing the AI program AlphaGo in March 2016. In the second match, AlphaGo made what Labatut describes as a historical move: move 37. In Seedol’s own words, “I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and it was merely a machine. But when I saw this move it changed my mind. Surely AlphGo is creative. This move made me think about Go in a new light. What does creativity mean in Go? It was not just a good, or great, or a powerful move. It was meaningful.”

Moments of transition require a type of push and pull that can be exhausting. Embrace parts and jettison the negative. Fall behind or move forward. Von Neumann wasn’t able to map out the human brain’s path to logic and reason. On a given day, my logic, how I decide to organize the minutes and seconds, feels like a bit of magic. When I was on the dirt paths on my bike, I chose certain paths over others in split seconds. Sure, I followed the smell of water or the flowers, I swerved onto a forested path to avoid a pile of horse shit. At some point in my life, I realized eating cake alone is no fun at all—some type of logic nestled between emotion and taste buds.

In March 2016, I was on a porch with my college friends, waiting for finals week to be over, aching from laughter, our coursework in a mess beneath us, while Seedol was realizing that AlphaGo had a mind that wasn’t human or mechanical, but something else entirely. What I am starting to understand is that we are different beings who have different functions, and there is something unexplainable in my being, that bit of magic, that bit of gut feeling and laughter and horse shit and Richie-like anger-passion. I need to keep honoring those altars of humanness by participating in my own physical life.

Reading: I finished “The MANIAC” obviously (and I definitely think “When We cease to Understand the World” is better but don’t regret reading his newest at all), and now in stark contrast, “All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy.

Listening: New Alex G album and Kokoroko. Also, because I went to Macy Gray with my mom, and it was the 25^th anniversary of her awesome 1999 album “On How Life Is,” I did a good bit of listening to that as well.

P.S. I have not made it past episode seven of “The Bear,” so please no spoilers. You know who you are.