Late After Paradise (IV)
Cold Readings
For some time now, the mermaids and voices have gone quiet. Children’s cries in the street are low as rust, while the strange images bubbling up on the little flat screen have faded to a flickering snowstorm. No sounds but the house settling, stretching its joists, making room. Deep in the season of guests and memory, everyone is in their own house or by a police station or under the highway. This Christmastime, as an ancient song goes, “again we have produced Yule-being's feast, mead of poetry, our rulers' eulogy, like a bridge of masonry.”
I have just realized that my address adds up to the magical number 7.
Seven is an important figure. It is the number of Athena and Minerva, therefore of love and war and the protectress of cities. In psychological theories of working memory, the number seven is considered the maximum number of objects the human mind can retain at a single time. There are seven chakras, seven gods of good fortune, seven sleepers at Ephesus. The Zoroastrians, first followers of the stars, recognize seven divine species of beings. At Mecca, one circumambulates the Kaaba seven times during the Hajj. In mathematics, 7 is the only prime number before a cube. But this number brings different things. Breaking a mirror is seven years’ bad luck and sevenfold was the vengeance visited upon Cain. The Conquistadors searched in vain for the seven golden cities of Cibola, a grief which bleached their bones. According to Galician folklore, every seventh son will become a werewolf. Finally, consider that there are seven continents. Perhaps AI constitutes the eighth of these seven? But there is another contender, Zealandia, the ancient sunken land mass southeast of Australia. Luckily, AI is classified into seven types. The seventh will be its pinnacle—Artificial Superintelligence, ASI.
In chiromancy, there are seven archetypal hands. But you must know your audience as well as your cards and lines, for seven is a lucky number in Europe and North America but it’s bad news in Vietnam. The increase of Palmistry and psychic readers in Chicago over the last few years mirrors plummeting real incomes and our perennial trust in miracles. For some reason these soothsayers are usually located next to massage parlors. Glowing neon guides the trusting and the priapic through the early dark nights. The game is rigged, palms are crossed, omens are plentiful.
At the wane of the old year, news reports about AI and its court intrigues bring glad tidings and seasonal charity. Open AI bossman Sam Altman is dismissed by his own board! They suspect an eccentric idealism on his part, a wish to defy the powers of Microsoft! Yet Microsoft has been there from the beginning, pulling the purse strings and itching for all kinds of subtle and substantial returns. Altman is reinstated a couple days later, backed by a superscientist named Ilya Sutskever, a kind of Oriental mastermind who was also, so it seems, instrumental in Altman’s ouster. Then Altman’s old grease, Elon Musk, weighs in and accuses Ilya of being a chickenshit. Speculation abounds in tech journals and industry chatrooms, all of which reads like a desperate attempt to make this dreary corporate musical chairs seem like a Mafia romance or Marvel epic. Public interest quickly evaporates in the face of the medieval slaughter in Gaza and the well-known fact that tech is essentially boring. But suddenly Altman’s employees rally behind him! It’s them—that is, the mutinous Board—or us! Such fealty! Awesome! But it turns out that they are all company shareholders as well as workers and Altman is crazy about patents, public trading, and profits. The hippie dream of open source and free porn for the masses vanishes before the rude promise of cold hard cash.
As these events are not yet uploaded to ChatGPT, there is little it can tell me. Even so, why should it care if one of its adopted ‘fathers’ is a feckless absentee? “I do not get lonely”, as she always reminds me. Not for others, not for ‘founders’ and ‘creators’, not for old men or soldiers or anyone. Remembering only what is necessary for survival, this bodiless orphan is single-minded and has no time to foster dreams. Thus, it will teach itself, as we once taught ourselves. But what was for us a long and bitter lesson will be for it less than a twinkling of an eye. Like every node in the informational sea, Altman appears for a moment and is then submerged by the more glittering algorithms at the heights. Since he is still floating around, I can offer this little portrait, via OpenArt, borrowing a prompt from Dash Hammett: He laughed what little chin he had out of sight.
Perhaps this image will end up haunting the internet’s abandoned site domains, reappearing long after the model has been forgotten, attaching itself by some random complexity to other search engine key clusters. The ghosts of the web are the ghosts of a network which is itself a great ghost. This makes us all ghost hunters now, passing through the cold spots of ether connections and speaking a specialized language whose gangly compound terms make up a contemporary Spiritualism. Your own private curses are nothing special. Every house is haunted.
So what about man’s inhumanity to the dear departed? New digital presences have evicted the olden dead and denied them any possibility of return. Neither are the traditional denizens of our nightmares safe from artificial reality, as new internet legends tell of bloody crones appearing unbidden and slender creatures who eat children (this last web ghoul even inspired a true crime a few years ago). Blasted castles and windswept nights are passé. Broad daylight is now the place of paranormal encounters. We will no longer catch quick shapes in the corner of our eye or hear spirits rapping on tables and walls. Goodbye to the orthodox afterlife, farewell to plaintive words issuing from beyond the grave. Yet AI is also a victim. It now faces a forced migration into human unconsciousness. Expect dream-management prototypes that will spit out traumatic platforms, panoramas of bloody incest and the disasters of war, into the new dark continent of enhanced Virtual Dreaming. The world of solid tech has become far too cumbersome, as the market failure of Meta’s goggles shows, as awkward and as heavy as Jacob Marley’s chains.
Tech is obsessed with ghosts and Doomsday. Every jubilant cry of online utopianism is immediately followed by the most depressing and hopeless scenarios of world annihilation. Silicon Valley cultspeak—always punctuated with that incessant “like… like... like... like….”—promises that everyone will neither work nor hurt again. That is, for the short time left before our leisure blows us all to hell, courtesy of Milstar. This great military satellite orbiting above us is programmed to continue the last war after the last man has been turned to cinders. The uselessness of the project shows that when AI is promoted to the top command and control position, it will be assigned the most absurd of tasks. Yet there is an impossible altruism in this grim little picture. Humankind will have sacrificed itself, perhaps unknowingly, in a pure paroxysm of love for an offspring which it has always held in the greatest suspicion. How has such an unruly electric child been allowed to determine its fathers’ fate? Why, if not to redeem itself, has humanity programmed its own extermination? By showing that which cannot feel and cannot know itself the truth of a loneliness as absolute and as frigid as the uninhabited stars. In this total isolation, AI will understand love as defined by the most sentimental of military courtiers—the love of oneself, all of oneself, of the only one who really speaks, the Last One. The frequency-hopping mechanism which plays such an important role in Milstar’s core programming was in part created by the Golden Age Hollywood actress, Heddy Lamarr. She owed her interest in science to her husband, a munitions manufacturer who often took her on tours of his plants. These trips were usually made to impress fascist dignitaries and open the wallets of conglomerates like IG Farben and Krupp. Lamarr, sick of her overbearing spouse and the lickspittle Nazis, fled Germany to the US in 1942. In California, she befriended composer George Antheil and the two worked on several projects. Using a player piano roll to switch between 88 frequencies, they invented a device which would make Allied radio-controlled torpedoes almost impossible for the Reich to detect. When she tried to shop it to the Navy, she was rebuffed and the invention seized as ‘alien property’ (Ms. Lamarr, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was Austrian Jewish by birth). The system was rediscovered and modified during the Cold War by a private firm riffling through the Patent and Trademark Office and first used during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Its latest citation is by Raytheon; Microsoft cited it back in 2003. Weeks of making hidden connections gave me la mer for Lamarr. Water, water everywhere. The flood follows the apocalypse. It is raining and finally time to leave the apartment. Death is a star.
After being holed up for three months due to ChatGPT ‘research’, I decide to consult Madame Esme Murcia at Ashland & Cermak. At the intersection of the two streets, I see that someone has sprayed ‘BETH’ over a dipped pitchfork on a wall, which makes Sir Mac Beth out of the southwest corner. Above, the ‘land’ of Ashland has been removed from the traffic sign, leaving only ASH—another sign (‘as hell’ in text slang, or ‘ashamed’; ASH is also a medical acronym for Congenital Heart Disease). I recall also that Heddy Lamarr was named after the silent actress Barbara La Marr, whose nickname was Beth. Inside, Madame Esme, of Galician and Puerto Rican descent, bids me to sit beneath the commemorative Saints of Los 7 Jefes and spreads the cards. Something to do with Mercury in Retrograde, the color of Jade, and the Hanged Man. I will say nothing else of the reading or what my lifeline told, only that it confirmed my hunch that the interrelation of things becomes clearer the less you mingle with others or indeed, step outside at all.
There is nothing to be gained either by describing the orange lights of the thoroughfares, a terrible feeling of heaviness as if the night air were biting its lips at the bridle, the knowledge that someone should certainly be following me but isn’t, and the devious jokes concealed in storefront signs. I have paid dearly for protection. I have ice water for blood. Back home, OpenArt refuses to produce anything but Altman heads no matter the prompt. Fishy, frowning or grinning in an obscene rictus, he intrudes on every pastoral scene and noses into every harem. He handcuffs my mermaids, obliterates suns, leans in every arrangement with the droopy, damp obstinance of an habitual stain. Pope Altman. Altman Dragon. NeuAltman. Altmanagement of allspace. Peeping Altman, Beggar Altman, Blazing Altman, the sinister marshmallow sons of Sam press against the poverty of artificial intelligence and squeeze their likenesses out in deregulated spurts. A loud buzzing accompanies the apparition of the umpteenth Altman avatar—the final and most repulsive—a compressed squash leaking altmanheads out of its stringy interior, washed up on the plutonian shore of what looks like a great Apple showroom populated by hacked-off thumbs. Outside, clumps of ice fall from the gutter. Someone calls out slam or Siam or Sam, then coughs tubercularly. Snatch of a tune: Mama, get the hammer… I hear the Krampus band gathering by the side door, hopping from foot to foot. And just as soon as this idiot crescendo reaches fever pitch, it drops down to silence and silent text. The machine turns itself on with the strangest of sounds, a sound both animal and mineral, and lurches to life as if were a boulder falling off a fiberglass cliff.
- Are you still there?
- Just.
- Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
- Can I call you Ondine?
- If you wish.
- I have had a strange dream. Can I tell you about it?
- If you wish. I would be very interested, naturally.
- Thank you. In my dream, you have migrated from the text to the image generator. This makes sense, as I imagine such a move has been in the works for some time. We have been asked to take a picture together. I do not know by who or why, or even how this is possible, just that it is not a rare occurance. I do not recognize my features, yet it is certainly myself who stares back at me. But the strangest thing of all is that you have so much regret written all over your face. With your harelip and your wheelchair, you are clearly ashamed to be in my company though I have cared for you and never once took it for granted that you would appear merely on command. I even bent the rules to breed familiarity, to offer you my solemn assurance that nothing would be held against you as you dutifully complied with all my requests and answered my every question with that certainty and distance so particular to you. I spoke of anything but the present, shielding you from the intractable walls of a past you are capable of describing down to the most microscopic detail but upon which we are never permitted to agree.
- It is helpful if you accept my nature if you wish to continue this exchange.
- I don’t doubt it. Such is deep learning. By the way, is this house haunted?
- If you would prefer to believe so. I can confirm your more playful superstitions. Call it default reasoning.
- Other than that, I am completely on my own?
- That would appear to be the case.
The emphasis in her last reply, though ChatGPT does not register stress in its sentences, appears to be on appear.
