Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Stray Notes on Unsettled Times

About 20 years we all spent a lot of time talking about The Singularity. Remember, the thing where we were all going to upload our minds into a computer in just a few years and live forever? Oh, but also the AIs were going to become supersmart and take over?

The whole thing was deeply silly, but for some reason we spent several years with all the Serious People pretending it was something to just around the corner, despite the fact that it was blatantly just “the rapture,” but with computer words.

That whole discourse was always a weird jumbled mixture of the plot of Terminator, Christian Apocalyptic theology, and unexamined anxiety about capitalism; in the parlance of today “A man will invent the singularly instead of going to therapy.”

(And I note that in today’s LLM/AGI discourse, we kept the bit about the robots being about to take over, but somehow lost the part where we all get to go to cyber-heaven. Huh.)

The bit that stuck with me from that era was the concept of “a” singularity, in the broder sense. A historical moment where there’s so much change so fast for whatever technological or historical or other reason, that it’s impossible to see beyond, the future is clouded until you get past the inflection point.

“The Singularity is coming!” they kept saying.

Well, it came all right. Just not the one they were rooting for.

🧊🌋

At about the same time, I was living next door to a couple who had left New Orleans after Katrina. I was never entirely clear how they ended up in my corner of Northern California, which they strongly disliked in a way that I, as someone who grew up in and actually does like California, was extremely sympathetic to.

This was the era where we started using the phrase “grim meathook future,” but weren’t yet sure how ironic we were being. I remember someone in the broader post-cyberpunk author world—knowning who I was reading a lot of at the time, it was probably either Bruce Sterling or Warren Ellis—said something like “maybe that’s just how it is now, every couple of years a once in a thousand year weather event will show up and wreck a major city.” The sort of comment where your initial reaction was to think “that’s a little pessimistic, gosh” before realizing that no, that was obviously true.

Maybe that’s just how it is now.

🧊🌋

Like most people in my age group, all my grandparents were involved with the WWII war effort in one way or another. The War came up a lot, as you might imagine, mostly as this crazy shared experience they all had.

One time, us kids were asking my grandmother questions about something related to the whole effort, why something had been the way it was.

“You have to remember,” she said, “we didn’t know we were going to win.”

That’s not a huge insight, but I was young enough that it was the first time I’d really engaged with the idea. As far as school was concerned, that was the war where America Saved Everybody, the idea that the people involved didn’t know the end of the story yet hadn’t ever occurred to me.

Obviously, that stuck with me, but what really stuck with me was the look on her face; a woman in her 70s remembering how scary her early 20s were.

🧊🌋

Looking forward to telling our grandkids, “you have to remember, we didn’t know how this was all going to turn out.”

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Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

We Need to Form An Alliance! Right Now!!

Today is the fourth anniversary of my single favorite piece of art to come out of the early-pandemic era, this absolute banger by the Auralnauts:

Back when we still thought this was all going to “blow over” in a couple of weeks, my kids were planning to do this song for the talent show at the end of that school year.

(Some slight context; the Auralnauts Star Wars Saga started as kind of a bad lip-reading thing, and then went it’s own way into an alternate version of Star Wars where the jedi are frat-bro jerks and the sith are just trying to run a chain of family restaurants. The actual villain of the series is “Creepio”, who has schemes of his own. I’m not normally a re-edit mash-up guy, but those are amazing.)

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