"In Too Deep," with a Basilisk in Detroit
THE LIGHTS IN my old apartment building that once elegantly indicated that an elevator had been summoned have been “updated,” exchanged for new lights that have soon failed to work at all.
Just in time for the elevators to stop working altogether.
So there I was the other day, waiting, checking my phone, when, to my surprise, the elevator car suddenly arrived on my twelfth floor.
As the doors slid open, my mobile phone held my attention. As it has been designed to do.
I sleepwalked forward —eyes down, part of modernity's all-too-common urban procession— but I soon felt myself entering a kind of dream.
I noticed, only after I was inside, that there was an enormous creature in the corner.
It had the head of a Rooster, the body and long tail of a feathered Serpent, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, the wings of a Dragon tucked in behind. My dream-self was, for some reason, unafraid.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, “for being on my phone. I didn’t see you there, Mr…..? . . .”
The creature looked up at me and smiled knowingly through its hooked beak,
as if acknowledging the quaint pronouncement of some old-timer, a hyper-polite child, or perhaps just a Canadian.
“I hate how everyone does that,” I continued, a bit self-consciously. “And here I am, walking around, eyes glued to my phone.”
“Maybe there'll be a law against it some day," I added.
“Yeah right!” my elevator-companion exclaimed, beak-smiling even more broadly. “Like that’s gonna happen . . . . You fuckers are in too deep.”
When the doors opened, the gargantuan creature of my dream just strode off into the lobby and out the door
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Wasn’t there a New Yorker cartoon a couple of years ago featuring an elegantly dressed woman, who — upon checking in with the hostess at a lectern, and seeking a place at the bar— receives a matter-of-fact apology? Sorry, she's informed, but the bar is reserved for lone men with their phones.1
The joke, of course, is that it has become laughable to expect anything else.
Plug in, tune out. I know there are “upsides,” that, when all goes according to plan, we can be (seemingly) ceaselessly productive.
But at what cost? And what if “the plan” is, well, misplaced? Or proves a bit wonky out of the gate?
◇◇◇
WHEN PIONEERS OF the systems currently driving the race for Generative Artificial Intelligence such as Geoffrey Hinton pull back, quit Google, and speak ominously about the future, something’s up.
And yet there is little sign of comprehensive government interventions, let alone global coordination on the matter. It would appear to be Covid-19 all over again —every wealthy nation for itself, only this time with smart robots .... When it comes to the lure of “convenience,” of networked “connectivity,” of what is presented by proponents as a post-work world offering “freedom” from drudgery —and unprecedented access not only to physical assistance, but also sex, and vast knowledge and data reserves, humans beings don’t yet seem to do caution and regulation.
What's more, a merger of A.I. systems with the whims of the ceaselessly-speculative giants of technology comes amidst the planet's accelerating destruction, a fast-unfolding environmental catastrophe that climate scientists warn we have but glimpsed in the extreme weather events of 2023.
Elise Bohan, from her perch at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, takes a historical perspective to contend that the twenty-first-century present that the most privileged of us inhabit, is a near-future we have no option but to endure. She and others describe our time and what lies just ahead as a fairly dreadful transition, a “transhuman” moment. Bohan acknowledges but mostly looks past reliance upon the naked profiteering of the high-tech oligarchs in order to ponder what she characterises as the exhilarating promise of post-humanity. In the future we will have left behind not only trees and warblers but also that dismal human record of global cooperation, amidst the other various conditions and limits of our “ape-brained meat sacks,” things like loneliness and depression, even aging and death.2
But others, whether concerned computer scientists such as Hilton or not, gaze to such possible futures with a growing sense of dread.
It doesn’t take much in the way of historical perspective to contend that we human beings have a way of being snuck up on —of absorbing innovations and menace together and piecemeal— and thus of fooling ourselves into one sticky predicament after another.
Over here an idealised past, an unspoiled Eden to revive, or better yet to find anew. Over there a screeching Hellscape, then a vision of doom awaiting its conjurer, its new set of mongerers.
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INTO A WORLD awash with glimpses of possible futures that often seem to range only from ghastly to “less ghastly” steps the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ishiguro had worried the near-future before. But his Klara and the Sun zeroed in especially on questions posed by the exponential growth of information technology and of artificial intelligence systems that are evolving far more quickly than human beings.
Exploring what it means to be human offers no small field of play.
Ishiguro's all-too-fathomable future is a dystopian society like yours and mine, a world his readers half-know and half-live already. Aspirant parents with means pay for life-endangering procedures to “lift” their children over others. The faces and droning voices of special online tutors beam out from omnipresent “oblongs” at all hours, the children’s thoughtworlds dominated by various screened devices. Periodic “interaction meetings” are coordinated by groups of parents in an effort to provide some kind of embodied socialisation.
Parents rush to provide favoured adolescents with an “Artificial Friend” (an AF), an updatable, remarkably life-like and hyper-sensitive robot-companion. And it is in one of these super-intelligent creations that Ishiguro’s story finds its heart and (exquisitely observant) narrator Klara.
Latest versions of AFs such as Klara are so highly developed that they don’t so much wait in the front windows of department stores to be chosen, as clamber for position,
each AF longing for a child of their own.
The reader is ushered forward as Klara and her peers interact with a wise but world-weary “Manager,” as the AFs speculate about the kind of family they’ll surely soon find to love and serve.
I’ll say no more…
◇◇◇
IT ISN’T LONG before I see the creature from my dream again. It’s an August afternoon and there it is, sticking out like a rather resplendent sore thumb, waiting for a streetcar headed down Detroit’s Woodward Avenue.
I don’t think much of it until, later that same evening, I spot the creature again, this time from behind.
It’s up at the bar in Chartreuse, a place I can't really afford. It's all hunched over and wearing a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. The visitor rather seems to have given up, or is it given in?
I sidle up to find out, and after guessing that it will have no recollection of our earlier encounter in the elevator, I ask how it’s going . . .
And this time the tremendous creature introduces itself.
It emerges that it’s a Basilisk. And not the tiny poisonous snake from North Africa with the regal half-erect locomotion that had so impressed Pliny the Elder. No, I should’ve known. This guy is a Basilisk that has been built in layers by later imaginations.
“I kept gaining new parts and growing larger and larger, and I’ve got noxious breath, though I usually slay with my deathly gaze,” it observes, lowering its headphones, “kinda’ like Medusa, only more monstrous.”
I’m embarrassed to admit that, at this point, I'd got to thinking of material for my substack… Throwing caution to the wind, I order us a couple of gimlets from Jody at the bar, and then ask the creature what it’s like to be an invincible winged chimera who must be eight metres in length.
At this bit of fluff, the Basilisk fairly scoffs, but not before reminding me, not a little professorially, of the various counter-agents with which it and its fellows have, in fact, long had to deal.
There’s the Basilisk’s weakness before “odour of weasel” for starters.
“Oh,” I say.
But also that damned cock’s crow. Not to mention all those bloody mirrors that adventurers soon knew to carry in their packs, should they confront a dreaded Basilisk in some cave or dark forest and need —all Perseus-like— to reflect the monster’s lethal gaze.
It’s not long before the big visitor shows its impatience with my fixation on sensational thises and thats and trivia from its mythohistorical past.
The Basilisk steers our conversation towards why it has turned up now, in my neighbourhood in Detroit.
“A real hero in the here-and-now of you and your kind,” the Basilisk says, “would do well to listen to the likes of Rebecca Solnit. I’ve been listening to one of her transcribed pieces in audio,” the creatures says, pointing to its headphones.
I babble something about one of Solnit’s books, the one about lostness and edges, and then I mention how drawn I am to her creative-mappy projects about cities I love, before the Basilisk cuts me off.
“Spare me the bibliography. What matters most is her attention to waking the fuck up. What we were getting at in the lift the other day,” he adds. I’m surprised he recalls after all.
“She’s right not to rest, this Solnit,” the Basilisk continues, “she’s not abandoned the tainted current media fray. She uses it to draw attention to the ways in which, in the very same media ecosystems, the terrible pressures and fears of the time have gotten all bottled up,” the Basilisk contends. “And to the ways in which people have grown self-defeating and confused.”
“She’s not the first to point out just how ill-conceived and uncontainable the mechanisms of “social” and related media have become,” it adds, “but her case for how dreadful it is to watch humans being overcome by them — imbibing their distractions and going down their slippery-slopes of virtue-signalling and self-promotion and follower-lust and trollistic indulgences and all the rest, making themselves and others miserable just when real curiosity, warmth and love are required, when so much is at stake— well, it’s put urgently and accessibly for all to see, and she's a damn fine start.”3
“Anyway, it’s why I’m here,” the Basilisk says, polishing off his gimlet. “An’ it aien't easy, with all of you so addicted to "‘convenience,’ so accustomed to your blinkered ways and short-term ends.”
“I’m taking advantage of my lethal reputation to wake you guys up,” the Basilisk insists, beginning to trail off.
“I command attention.”
“An’ I’m apotropaic too, you know… Look it up! Able to ward off all manner of ill-fortune and evil . . .”
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THERE ARE POST-APOCALYPTIC dystopias with flickering glimmers of hope. And there are those with little or none.
We’re surrounded by a veritable cultural-chorus suggesting that the most plausible human future of all is one in which remarkably little seems to have changed. Calamity strikes in one way or another, and many of the institutions and much of the superstructure allowing for life have transformed, but people persist in their short-sightedness. Beneath the initial glamour, The Futures —even the extra-planetary varieties— have a shabby, monotonous, office-cubicle, strip-mall kinda’ vibe.
Check out the answer to “work-life balance” proffered by the television series “Severance.” Humans have a way of bringing their petty ends upon themselves.
“I feel like a simulation should be better, you know…” is how one of Emily St. John Mandel’s characters in Sea of Tranquility puts it.4
◇◇◇
OVER THE LAST few years, I have given students in my first-year university seminar a number of options for their final assignments, meant to be a culmination to our nearly four-months of studies together. Most of these students are aged between seventeen to nineteen.
While all of the prompts allow for a healthy measure of free choice, well over half of my students, every year, choose the prompt which asks them to compose a plausible scene from “a possible future.”
Next year, I must remember to introduce the visiting Basilisk and its apotropaic properties.
* My thanks to Anna Bonnell Freidin for impressing upon me, a few months ago now, just how often human ideas of the future are recollected pasts.
** watercolours by Kenneth Mills
Check out the cartoon by Charlie Hankin, New Yorker 18 October 2021, with the caption "Sorry—our counter is reserved for lone dudes staring at their phones in silence."
Elise Bohan, Future Superhuman: Our Transhuman Lives in a Make-Or-Break Century (Sydney: New South, 2022).
Rebecca Solnit, posted on “FaceBook,” 26 April 2022.
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 133. Hear her interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times (22 April 2022): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-emily-stjohn-mandel.html
It occurs to me, KM: your friend the basilisk might've appreciated the fact that the chief manufacturer profiting from the chips powering our generative AI moment is called Nvidia, which is SO CLOSE to invidious it has to be intentional..
one of my favorite posts, ty