“It makes me want to think!” she said.
“Good, good, I’m so glad!” I returned, coasting on post-lecture relief.
I used to do magic tricks when I was a teenager. One mistake, and some kid would start yelling “It’s in his other hand!”
The illusion, brittle with contention (I’m here to fool you), shattered immediately, leaving me a mirror salesman with a broom and dustpan.
Some assembly required.
Speaking can be the same way. I’m an expert, you’re not, sit at the little desk and listen.
Lecture is a pretentious word, one that breaks easily under strain. I set out to be important. Now the idea is the important thing, and I’m making really big living rooms to host conversations in. I just happen to be the host.
While that’s appropriate sometimes (and the ability to command a lectern important), yesterday was full of semicircles and tables scooted out of the way and people leaning in with a guided conversational jam session and talking and thinking.
How ‘bout them robots?
How does AI work?
What does it mean to be human?
I’ve been giving a lot of speeches this week. The people give me such hope.
Speech 4: Mozart
Earlier in the day, twenty miles south: The topic was Mozart and the 1780s, another era of big hair, big thoughts, eerily similar slogans that sounded good at the time ("Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité") but didn’t turn out so well for everyone, especially the figurehead(less) folks like Marie and even Robespierre.
We sat around in a semicircle, and marveled at Amadeus.
Wouldn’t you?
Lorin Maazel shot lightning bolts of the Jupiter symphony from the TV screen.
“What treasures these are.”
“Thank you for preserving them.”
“It’s up to all of us, right?”
We gathered, and thought.
Speech 3: Boom
“Josh, why do you have a fork in your shirt pocket?”
“Oh…I was demonstrating a supernova. Would you like your fork back?”
The executive director raised an eyebrow.
“Yes I would.”
It was storytime on the dementia ward. “Did you hear about that supernova?” I accidentally made an old woman jump when the star fused iron, collapsing in on itself, and bounced off the neutron core…(when the balloon popped with the fork.)
I had to stab it three times. Some things are still surprising.
“Here’s your silverware back.”
Speech 2: Cosmic Yardsticks
Charlottesville, VA. Historic observatory. In the same room as the telescope that measured our own galaxy. A demonstration of astronomical distances.
Put the one-armed Barbie 13 feet from the candle.
“That’s the scale distance of Venus from the Sun.”
If machines could express, the telescope would have raised an eyebrow.
But am I wrong?
Speech 5: The Robot Task Force
“An Artificial Intelligence talk shouldn’t be controversial.”
“Oh, but it is” exclaimed the programmer sitting next to me.
“….True.”
Someone asked about my background. So I set the tone.
(Convoluted musician history removed for clarity)
“I’m a writer, speaker, and…I care deeply about the truth, and the search for the truth. Opposing viewpoints, in good faith, aren’t only a nicety, but essential for the solving of complex problems. Here are a few things I’ve found in the study of AI, and what it means to be human. Let’s have a chat about it.”
So we did. The bosses were there. One of the county supervisors was there. An author colleague was there.
What a conversation! So many views, all working together, self-reflecting, pondering, wondering, living.
(Hey robots, you’d better watch out.)
From the observatory to the dementia ward, to watching Mozart to the intense thinking on computer science and reason, I see a hunger to think.
To lift one’s head from the trough, and wonder “Hey, maybe there’s something else on the menu.”
To catch a neighbor’s eye, realize they think differently, and realize “Hey, they’re alright.”
And then to realize “Hey…they’re needed.”
A buddy told me his take on Humans vs. AI the other day. "
“It sounds mushy but…I think love is the difference.”
I see the search for Truth as contagious.
Can’t you feel it?
Oh, we’re going to be alright if we keep trying.
Here’s a poem I wrote you.
Contagion
In the shade of summer trees no longer careless
Quietly, under streetlights (there’s no kids playing anymore)
Approaching footsteps on a night patrol.
The passwords match, but…
Each soldier realizes the other is the enemy.
(But they don’t seem like one.)
(Something doesn’t fit. Is High Command wrong?)
They part, dazed, to return home with a headache
The pain of dissonance can’t mask a spark of hope
Of a garden in June
That maybe we won’t have to be fed anymore
With whatever’s on the menu
Everywhere I turn, people ask about the Truth in hushed whispers
Urgently.
PS. What about Speech 1? “Bee Day” on D-Day. We honored, remembered, and appreciated the massive victory of little things won, like bees and dandelions.