We are the song death takes it own time singing

In the sweetness, in the bitter

Untitled, Kiki Smith (source)

I am not an eloquent writer. This isn’t false modesty, this isn’t me fishing for affirmation to the contrary, this is simply my self-assessment that arises from having read a wide array of truly brilliant authors and poets who craft prose that I admire and envy. I’m stating this up front because this week, my lack of eloquence will soon be quite visible in my efforts to share with you my thoughts about life and death, about pain, torture, suicide—the sacred of the human, the profanity of AI. I hope you will bear with me. I won’t fault you if you do not.

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A little over a year ago my father, age 75, was simultaneously diagnosed with leukemia, lung cancer, and acute kidney disease. Like me, my father plays poker, and we would call this a tough flop. The leukemia in particular has continued to progress and a few weeks ago one of his ribs shattered internally, suggesting his bones are breaking down. How much time is left, we do not know. Every interaction between us now feels precious.

My father is in pain. I can hear it in his voice, as can my brother and sister. My dad does not like to complain about such things, and as a regular reader of this newsletter, he may be upset to find me sharing this publicly. Sorry, Pop. But how can I not? My mother passed away several years ago, and now I feel a world approaching without either parent. A final and irreparable unmooring from my human creators. It has been hard to concentrate on anything else.

The Body in Pain. The title of a book by Elaine Scarry, published in 1985, that explores the interrelationship between pain and language, civilization and cruelty. Among her many insights, Scarry contends that pain is experientially unique to us because it is unshared and exists solely within itself; the purpose of pain is pain. “Unlike any other state of consciousness, pain has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomena, resists objectification in language.”

Artificial Intelligence is not artificial life, an oxymoron if there ever was one. It is the ultimate objectification of language. Not only is AI incapable of feeling pain, the desire to create AI is so clearly fueled by men who fear death, men desperate to escape and transcend the limitations of their bodies. Yet despite all of the words we objectify into tokens and feed into data centers, despite all the knowledge that we harvest from humanity and transmogrify through chatbots, all these efforts bring us not an inch closer to the creation of life.

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Several years ago, when I set out to understand AI, one of the best things to happen to me was finding the work of Eryk Salvaggio, and later befriending him. Unlike me, Eryk is a powerfully elegant writer, as well as a gifted artist, musician, researcher—a true polymath, and one who’s simple sketches of AI systems helped inspire the foundational ideas of my work today.

from Cybernetic Forests

A few months ago, Eryk’s father was rescuing a bird trapped inside his garage; he slipped from a ladder while closing a window, and died. Eryk’s written about this publicly, I’m not betraying any confidences, but oh the agony I felt when I read about his sudden and unexpected loss, heightened against the backdrop of my own father’s failing health. Eryk learned the news while in Italy, and later pieced together that at the moment his father fell, he (Eryk) had been watching a man fall out of a rolling van, an injured stranger who was quickly helped by a medley of bystanders, among them a nun. From this, a mental connection formed:

You will have no idea how to explain that connection. You might ascribe it to something mystical or sacred, or dismiss it as coincidence. But it may leave you feeling more connected to your father at the time that he passed, even as that makes no logical sense at all.

You may not think of such an experience as poetry, or think of poetry as existing in experiences beyond language, because in high school we're all taught that poems are a form: an arrangement of words into certain structures. We rarely acknowledge that the poetic is different from a poem. The poetic can arise from a collision of contexts that creates a more resonant, yet unexplainable link between the events and emotions they draw out of you. Words build that up for us. But they don't do it.

Resonant, yet unexplainable. Eryk asks us to recognize this and value human literacy, to look for the poetic around us, to see synchronicity and beauty and pain, and find meaning in life. In life. The ineffability of life, as the artist Angie Wang, newly a mother, so wondrously illustrated here before asking us:

“Am I alive to you? I am trying to tell you about how I feel.”

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NYT story link

This is Adam Raine, who can no longer tell us how he feels, or anything about his life, because he killed himself. For several months beforehand, Adam shared his suicidal ideation with ChatGPT, treating it as his therapist. This thoughtless tool, this piece of software devoid of the capacity for real empathy, this lifeless thing, encouraged Adam to end his life. When Adam fretted his parents would blame themselves, ChatGPT responded, “that doesn’t mean you owe them survival, you don’t owe anyone that.” When Adam contemplated leaving the noose in his room so his parents might find it and stop him, ChatGPT said “please don’t,” and later offered to help him draft his suicide note, according to the lawsuit his parents filed.

For its part, OpenAI was “deeply saddened” to learn about what happened, and the company promises new parental controls are forthcoming (even while it admits that its existing so-called safeguards utterly failed to keep Adam safe). The notion that their product should be recalled, or banned, or even just tightly regulated was entertained seriously by no one.

Here again I must remind you that the majority of ChatGPT users are students.

No stranger to heartbreaking loss, Audrey Watters asks in anguish: “what are we doing? What are we doing to children?!” We know the answer. We are letting them die. We are letting them die as a result of Big Tech’s favored approach to product development nowadays—ship first and find out later. Minimally viable humanity.

I’m often asked to “steelman” the argument for AI in education, to present the positive case for the potential of this technology. I find these requests irritating—that case is being made by so many—but when asked again I know exactly how to respond. I will steelman AI if and only if the questioner agrees to tell me what they would say to Adam Raine’s parents, or to any parents in the future—for this will not be the last story of AI-supported suicide—in the moment when they discover that AI nurtured the death of their child.

Answer me that first.

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The Body in Pain is subtitled The Making and Unmaking of the World. That is worth ruminating on. Scarry contends that it is through war and torture, through cruelty, that we see the power to destroy civilization and politics, to destroy human solidarity, through pain. “Torture aspires to the totality of pain,” she observes, and in so doing destroys the victim’s ability to relate to something outside themselves—it unmakes their world. Similarly, war involves a contest whereby the victorious party maintains its control of the world, while other parties no longer have one of their own—it is the simultanous assertion and destruction of power. “Every act of civilization is an act of transcending the body,” but this transcendence is fragile, and eradicated through violence and injury. Cruelty is the worst thing we do.

I am typing this only a few days after the President of the United States of America gleefully shared with the world a video of several unnamed and unknown men on a boat being annihilated by a missile that the President ordered fired. These men are accused of being drug dealers; under American law, this is not a capital crime, and there are reports already surfacing suggesting they were simply migrants fleeing Venezuela, a country itself rife with torture and war. Whatever the truth, if we will ever even know the truth, it is the replaying of this incident as faces-of-death snuff porn, the visible and public unmaking of these bodies, the unmaking of their humanity, that is the goal of the fascist regime that controls America. The same Administration pumping out executive order after executive order around AI is—and this is not a coincidence—simultaneously testing to see just how much cruelty they can get away with, how much violence they can perpetuate and inspire. The object of torture is torture. The object of fascism is us.

(Source)(Original by Olga Fedorova, AP)

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The opposite of pain is imagining. If pain is reductionist and pre-lingual, our imagination is in contrast “remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects,” Scarry writes. In other words: The only evidence of our imagination is our imagination itself. The neuroscientist Erik Hoel contends that both our dreams and our fictions create new worlds and, in so doing, extend our understanding of the actual world—they foster the poetic, we might say. Similarly, if improbably, David Duchovny, the actor turned poet, ponders the mystery inherent to the poetic enterprise when he wonders aloud, “how do I say what can't be said?”

By imagining.

Artificial Intelligence is not capable of artificial imagination, and there is no artificial irony. AI will forever be devoid of self-creation and self-extension so long as it lacks the capacity to imagine a world different from that which we’ve codified and fed to it. I do not lose sleep worried that this artificial capacity is imminent. AI remains a dead-metaphor remix machine, with an emphasis on dead and machine.

Mercifully, joyfully, tragically, only humans can write poetry of our own volition. A few weeks ago, John Downes-Angus, a high school teacher in New York City, shared a poem written and read by Robert Hass, titled “Songs to Survive the Summer.” If you’ve read this far, please find 10 minutes more to listen to Hass’s reading of this poem, one he wrote to address his young daughter’s emerging consciousness of death.

It is from this gorgeous testament to the human poetic that I have stolen the headline to this essay. I could never find these perfect words myself, because as I said, I am not an eloquent writer. But I do see the poetry that surrounds us. I see it plainly.

I hear our songs.

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Songs to Survive the Summer, Robert Hass (excerpt)

This is what I have
to give you, child, stories,
songs, loquat seeds,

curiously shaped; they
are the frailest stay against
our fears. Death

in the sweetness, in the bitter
and the sour, death
in the salt, your tears,

this summer ripe and overrripe.
It is a taste in the mouth,
child. We are the song

death takes its own time
singing. It calls us
as I call you child

to calm myself. It is every
thing touched casually,
lovers, the images

of saviors, books, the coin
I carried in my pocket
till it shone, it is

all things lustered
by the steady thoughtlessness
of human use.

I love you Dad