How are we writing the future of humanity?
Consciousness spinning
In the span of a single 24-hour period, the International Space Station will orbit our planet 16 times. Imagine being one of six astronauts aboard—or rather, imagine being all six, whirling around and around and around with both time and space distorted in ways all but unimaginable to our lived experiences on Earth.
This is the premise of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. It is a remarkable book. There are no chapters per se; time is divided by orbits. It’s not the sort of novel that can be “spoiled” really, but if you don’t want to know anything more about what unfolds, stop here.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
This question pops up in orbit 10, via an email that’s been sent to the American astronaut Shaun from a magazine seeking his comment on a separate lunar mission that’s just underway. Shaun thinks he’s the wrong person to ask, partially because life in space mostly involves the immediate present; when oxygen is precious, even breathing requires deliberation. He thinks too that to become an astronaut requires more brazen selfishness than self reflection, “the propulsion of a self determination that burns everything in its path.”
America will turn 250 this week, at least by one measure. Hard to feel celebratory. A country presently consumed by its own brazen selfishness, burning everything in its path.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
Unsure of how to respond to the question, Shaun shares it with one of his fellow space travelers, the Italian astronaut Pietro.
The future of humanity?, Pietro repeats back.
Yep, how are we writing it?
With the gilded pens of billionaires, I guess.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
Someone told me once that Jeff Bezos wrote about going to space when he was in high school. I don’t know if it’s true. I do know that, when William Shatner went into space at age 90 on one of Bezos’s private space flights, he (Shatner) wrote poignantly about the profound grief arising from the experience:
While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death.
This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside.
Here is a video of Shatner trying to explain some of these feelings to Bezos shortly after they’d returned to Earth. Bezos nods absently before interrupting to ask his wife to bring them a bottle of champagne.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
Nowadays, I’m unable to be away from my phone for sustained durations of time, even when reading. This bothers me of course. But ironically, because each orbit in Orbital is only a few pages, it’s well suited for mental fidgeting; in between orbits I’ve been hopping over to BlueSky to get my algorithmic fixes.
This morning, between orbit 9 and 10, I read this story by James Ball, a journalist in England, about the sad last gasps of Zuckerberg’s dying Metaverse, a different form of empty space. We can all delight in its death, I hope. Virtual reality is one future that various techno-enthusiasts have tried to write for 70 years, maybe longer, only to fail again and again and again. An unwanted space. Gilded pens the billionaires may have, but their ideas still suck. Ball observes:
“For years, CEOs and venture capitalists told us the future was the metaverse. Almost overnight, all of them are now pronouncing with equal confidence that the future is, in fact, in artificial intelligence—and the story sounds familiar. Whether we like it or not, it will transform the world of work and how we socialise. Some argue it is already sentient, with a humanity of its own.
They seem to find no time for reflection on a future that didn’t come to pass, on all the predictions they got wrong.”
How are we writing the future of humanity?
There is no time, Lou Reed tells us:
This is no time for celebration/This is no time for saluting flags/This is no time for inner searchings/The future is at hand
One of my dad’s favorite musicians, and my mother too. The secular prophet of the Riley family.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
When my father died, I found among his things an early version of an Oculus Rift. I was surprised, as he’d never mentioned the Metaverse to me; I wonder if he was just a little bit embarrassed by his interest. But of course it makes sense. He loved new technologies and the novels of William Gibson (I did too, once).
Among other things, in the early 1980s Gibson coined the phrase cyberspace to describe the intermediated digital world accessible we’d jack into using decks. Interesting etymology, cyberspace. The melding of cybernetics, the purported science of feedback systems, with the abstraction of space, something that is everywhere and nowhere. Feedback into nowhere.
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed—you may have heard that from Gibson too.
Which already-present future awaits us, I wonder. Is it this one? This one? This one?
How are we writing the future of humanity?
“AI is just a tool,” something I’ve said and written more than once. I’ve done so deliberately, in the hopes of demystifying AI, making it intelligible, calming people down, perhaps neutralizing to some minor degree both the grandiose abundant promises of the techno-salvationists and the ludicrous death-cult fantasies of the so-called AI doomers. Humans are toolmakers, and we made AI. It’s just a tool.
L.M. Sarcasas warns me, be careful with that metaphor, or more pointedly, just stop using it. He reminds us that to call AI just a tool implies a neutrality that does not exist, as if it’s simply a matter of choosing between useful applications of AI versus those that are harmful. This obscures the ways in which AI permeates our environment and shapes our perceptions, as surely as language does. “I am astounded by how blithely some insist that it is all as simple as learning to use AI well, as if we had not just undergone a nearly 20-year, society-wide experiment showing that a so-called ‘tool,’ say a smartphone or a social media platform, will (mal)form even the most vigilant and virtuous user into its own image and shape. This is the blindness at the heart of modern technological hubris.”
I know this, and at times I’ve remembered to say it aloud. Ursula Franklin observed that technology is a mindset, a system, an ideology. Audrey Watters reminds us of this every week. AI may be a tool, but it’s not just a tool, and that distinction is vital. I vow to remember this.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
A quiet power that emerges early in Orbital: to see our planet not as an intermediate holdover space for our temporary existence, but rather the culmination of all that has preceded us, and that which protects us—in this sense, Heaven.
Shatner again: “I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia.”
Samantha Harvey imagines alien observers who stumble upon the International Space Station and wonder why we humans have chosen to do this, to have developed this device and sent it beyond the limits of our own sky with six souls trapped within? To what purpose?
The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
Let’s dwell for a moment on the methodology suggested here for carving our future: Writing, how are we capable of writing? I find it forever astounding. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick imagined the moment when our human ancestors discovered the first tool (and promptly used it to start smashing the skulls of others), but I fantasize about when someone first recognized that a marking of some sort, an inscription, could represent something…well, something else. Accounting for a collection of grain, some think at the start.
And with time, words for ever more abstract ideas. Freedom. Justice. Solidarity.
Large language models, do they write? Yes and no. They certainly produce words. But the process they use in training, the statistical method employed to create correlations between words—or more accurately, words eviscerated into tokens—is always algorithmic and automated. The word for this process has always struck me as equally apt and harrowing: Autoregression.
A mechanistic process of stepping backwards, thoughtlessly.
Our world in autoregression.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
Here is a painting from 370 years ago, Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez :
The astronaut Shaun brings a postcard of this painting on his journey, given to him by his wife. In orbit 1, Harvey asks—who is the subject here?
Look, really look.
Is it the girl? The ladies-in-waiting? The king and queen reflected in the mirror (did you spot them)? The mysterious man in the stairwell? Velázquez himself, sizing up this strange little world?
Or perhaps, Harvey wonders: “Is the subject art itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within life), or life itself (which is a set of tricks and artifices within a consciousness that is trying to understand life through perfections and dreams and art)?”
Do you begin to see why ever page of this novel feels precious? Do you feel how profoundly human all this is?
(Later, Pietro sees the postcard spinning in the air. After examining it for a few seconds, he declares: It’s the dog. The subject is the dog.)
How are we writing the future of humanity?
How are we writing the future of humanity?
My girlfriend is reading Orbital with me (free relationship tip: read together). Our love was borne of this newsletter; she found my writing, and so she found me. Yesterday, she told me that Orbital is really a love letter to our planet. To us.
AI will never love, and it will never write a love letter. AI will never break down crying when writing an essay over the weekend while listening to Lou Reed, feeling the ache of having lost both parents while feeling unmoored within space and time, adrift in a strange liminal state of consciousness, still capable of day-to-day functioning in all the required ways yet constantly feeling this tug, this pull, an undertow that is both of the past and yet somehow the future, sensing a newfound relationship with time that’s bound up with grief, never having expected as a child that the future would be so relentlessly worrying, and wanting so desperately to smash so many gilded pens, yet still clinging to the possibility of optimism without hope, and reaching now for words once copied from a memorial to Oliver Sacks, revisting this elegant testament to an essential humanity, to remember to care and feel empathy for those who are different or less fortunate, to have fun and love often, to find wonder and beauty and know gratitude, and unexpectedly in this moment of yearning to trace my fingers across the lived contours of my exulted lover, and I suppose I should stop now with whatever this is and luckily the neighborhood children have dropped by and they’d like to know if I can go outside and play and my answer is yes I say yes I will yes.
The earth is the answer to every question.
I cried reading this.
This is wonderful writing, Ben. I noted this morning some random person's comment to the effect that we can feel hopeful that Elon Musk has a company working on a cure for ALS.
My reaction to this commenter, and William Shatner, and Stanley Kubrick, is just what will our Randian Tycoon set do with truly great breakthroughs or new meaningful insights that they come across? Smash their enemies or save lives and help us find grand meaning? Yet so many of us are waiting for this system that has given rise to these several men, to provide us with solutions and use them for a greater good.
I fear this will be the last version of America that our generation experiences. And so many of us built our lives around pursuing something better.