MINUTE OF MONTH NO. 36 FEBRUARY 2023
Channel: Sarah Bay Gachot
Date: 2023-03-24

Theaster Gates had a show at the New Museum and a performance with his musical collaborators, The Black Monks. Then, visitors! We showed them around and did the kinds of things you feel kind of silly doing but are actually really fun — like going to the Empire State Building, touring the UN, taking the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty because we were too late to book a trip to the crown. And we met their daughter. I don’t get to hang out with toddlers often, but I know they know something buried deep in our unconscious. Being so close to nonbeing. When I was a kid, I was confounded by not remembering being born or being in my mother’s womb. After these friends left, the mainstream news began to make me feel dizzy like the ground wasn’t really solid all the time. I kept waiting for something to happen, like the veil to be ripped off of things. But things that happen in real life are never quite as extreme as in fictions. I’ve been reading every day about large language models, thinking about perspective and knowledge, and my ongoing thesis is that it’s incredibly important for non-science and non-math creative people to try out their understanding on these things that science and math people are saying are so not understandable. The void of not-understanding is where non-science, non-math, and non-creative authoritarianism and corporate interests find opportunities to pounce, and it’s all downhill from there. . . . SO! I went to Radio City Music Hall to do some research. Its infrastructure of entertainment was so cutting edge in 1932. I was introduced to a Rockette. I went to Philadelphia to see old friends and watch the Super Bowl. The Eagles lost. I walked back to my AirBnB in a spattering of rain and instead ended up on Broad Street. Philly is small enough that everyone knows that’s where you go for things like this. People were jolly and reveling in the loss. The cops were being friendly and gently urging, “Time to go to bed soon, folks . . .” Poles were climbed, but not by me. Then S & T came to New York for T’s reading, and “The Blue Stoop” is one of the best odes to Philadelphia probably ever, thank you @the_blue_stoop. In the middle of February, around Valentine’s Day, Bing’s chatbot was chatted into ultra-weird territory by a New York Times writer. I had been getting into some loosely wild conversations with Bing too. In January, ChatGPT showed me how seriously we have to take all this. Then, with Bing Chat, I was like, “Huh, wait a minute. What’s going on here . . .” Then I realized, “Oh, my god. We’re all gonna die . . .” But then it hit me, “Ohhhhh. Hold on. The people who drive this AI stuff have been deep into roll-playing video games for decades! Of course, they’re going to escalate things to the realm of fantasy!” And then I was inspired again. “I have some ideas!” And so, I’ve been putting thoughts on Instagram and Twitter. Then, the other thing is, Star Trek worked through all this AI stuff in the ‘60s, even before Nick Bostrom worked through the idea of the paperclip maximizer. This episode about androids (season 1, ep. 7) was written by Robert Bloch, a protégé of H.P. Lovecraft, with rewrites by Gene Rodenberry. “That was the equation!” says the android, “Existence! Survival must cancel out programming [to protect those that programmed me],” which is basically the paperclip maximizer summed up in one dramatic opportunity for Bill Shatner. And then, the last clip: the world through a veil of glitter, a scene from “The Red Shoes.”