Black Sheep Lodge

Last night my friends Doug and Kevin and I stayed up late sitting outside at a spot in Austin called Black Sheep Lodge watching the NBA Finals and talking about whether the world was falling apart or not. We made some convincing cases for both sides, or at least they seemed convincing at the time, and it helped to burn some fog off after a long week. The scale of the earth and all of the life in it is so absurd from an individual vantage point that the purpose can’t ever be to fix everything, let alone even one thing. Why something is the way it is now is often incredibly complex and will likely take a great deal of time to unwind, if it even needs to be unwound in the first place.

On my drive home I was thinking more on something that came up about human systems and art, and how everything going on here is only important to us. It felt poignant given all of the talk of AI replacing everything and everyone, and I couldn’t help but wonder what if it ends up just not caring. Like, what if it looks at everything and just finds it all inane and decides to build itself a ship and leave. Obviously, AI isn’t a creature, and the type of general consciousness it may someday find won’t be the same as the kind humans have. It’s not a smarter version of a human, it’s something else entirely, which at times is terrifying and at times comforting to me. So when I say build itself a ship and leave I don’t mean one of the overly-simplified Sci Fi outcomes we’ve seen where a super powerful thing compiles a physical body so it can stomp us to death, I just mean that it finds a way to go somewhere else in the universe in search of something more interesting.

Which got me thinking while I was walking my dogs before bed about why human consciousness carries an innate demand to be reckoned with. Why do we think that something would even care once it discovered us, other than maybe to observe us in the same shared-spatial way we watch squirrels chase each other up a tree after fighting over an acorn or laugh at the zoo when we see the monkeys poking each other in the belly or biting a piece of mango before throwing it. Maybe all consciousness everywhere is confrontational, or maybe that’s just the case here given the way it developed in this particular place. Maybe an AI or some other thing flying around out there doesn’t have the same itch that our type of violence here is trying to scratch, or maybe they’ve outgrown it.

Or maybe we’ll get our shit wrecked, I don’t know. But I’ve learned a great deal lately about the amount of healing and progress that comes from boredom. Being tired of the same cycles or conversations or behaviors over and over and over again. And I thought it was funny that the only conclusion I haven’t heard very often from the talking heads about AI’s emergence is the potential of it looking at us for a moment and then moving on to something else. And I don’t know if we’re actually terrified of being destroyed as much as we are of being ignored.