THE HUMAN RACE

An Evolving Narrative

When it’s all too much/You turn the TV set on/And light a cigarette/Then a public service announcement/Comes creeping on/You see a lung corroding/Or a fatal heart attack/Turn to me …

Some forty years ago I read an essay on stereo equipment (I’m still a whiz at that 70s stuff) in The New Yorker. A witty, incidental aside described any Lou Reed album as a “suicide note.” Lou’s streetwise image was perhaps a genuine contrivance, but the entire New Sensations album (1984) suggested he was in a borderline emotional state teetering precariously over a shallow pond of good moodiness. “Turn to Me” will never be mistaken for Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” even though their messages are the same. To put it somewhat less succinctly in the excruciatingly evangelical boardroom stenography of modern times, you’ve got to “reach out in order to move forward with ongoing clarity.”

When the revolutions per minute shellac you beyond 78, you’ve got to know who to call. Unlike Dylan’s “Mister Jones,” I’m acutely aware of my broken handle on things, a rusted crank that’s no key to the mystery of what the hell is going on. But I know some people. And I’ve reached a stage in my life when I’m not prepared to brazen it out any more. I’ve learned a lot but I still know an iota less than fuck all. There may never be a right answer, there may never be a wrong one, but you better understand the question.

The first time my friend Jim Gibson instructed me to “ping” him, I assumed he’d become fluent in Esperanto or at least an elite player in a beer bottle cap league. He’s a hi-tech digitized guy. Back in high school he foresaw what was coming and it wasn’t computer science students printing out perforated portraits of Snoopy. When I need blockchain explained or fret about the state of the metaverse beyond its existence in a Spider-Man cartoon, I get in touch with Jim. Because I don’t ping him, I sometimes wait weeks for him to call me back.

Tip of the Spear (2017) was Jim’s first book. A rumination on a potential slow-motion trainwreck involving the organic and digital worlds. Four minutes to midnight at the crossing. Its thesis was positively Hemingwayesque: Progress is good. Increasingly sophisticated technology is simply a mere tool; perhaps even the Platonic ideal of an accelerant or efficiency. Civilizations have been disrupted so many times before throughout history and so why not right here right now?

A decade on, Tip of the Spear is now as irrelevant as those Wired magazines stacked for resale at a kiosk in your local antiques mall. When Artificial Intelligence only existed on printed pages, in the speculative works of Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. I believe the tech bro mantra is something like “Move fast and break things and sweat the legalities and ethics later". Nobody thought to x-ray the contents of the AI Pandora’s Box before blowing its lid off. As for me, I picture a Large Language Model as a big sweaty fat guy with an extensive vocabulary of malapropisms; maybe he just perseveres.

The revolution will not be televised/There will be no re-run, brothers/The revolution is live!

Great writing transcends its primary inspiration, its initial context. Living words evolve into cosmic stencils. A sage observation however misapplied or misinterpreted down the road can never be stripped of its universal truth. This is why the lyrics of Gil Scott-Heron, an American jazz poet and musician writing about Black Power in 1971 America, suit my state of mind as I try to grasp for some understanding amid the advent of AI with its promising myriads of blessed miracles and dreadful threats of unforeseen consequences. All I know is that something’s happening very fast and faster than the speed of enlightenment.

The Human Race, in its Schrodinger’s cat forms, is a collaborative effort. Jim and co-author and colleague Laura Haynes are grappling with our immediate science fiction future on Substack in real time. We have been seduced by Aristotle’s prime principle of proper drama – we have suspended our collective disbelief of AI. It’s here, there and maybe everywhere. We need critics, thinkers, not glib social media meme fodder; these are not the times for ill-considered off the cuff remarks. Together Jim and Laura as writers, as informed, objective observers, have courageously rolled a set of quantum dice.

The penultimate draft of The Human Race is now available for download on Substack. The audio and tactile books, scheduled for the end of this year. They could all be very different. Mumbling as a writer, I can tell you this much: it takes me years to write a novel; it takes me a week or so to write a blog post; it takes me a week or a month to write song lyrics for The Muster Point Project. Sympathy cards for funerals don’t come easy. The process of putting anything, anything of mine out there petrifies me. I admire Jim and Laura because in my darker moments I could “refudiate” (God bless you, Sarah Palin! Idiotic neologisms are so seductive. Talk suggestive acronyms to me; I’m begging. How was I to know you’d morph into a US Republican Einstein? A Tea Party? How quaint!) everything I’ve ever done, rewrite it all and then start the cycle over again. There’s an app for that now.

Had I even an iota of inclination to do so, I’d parachute myself into a minefield of dilemmas. Am I being edited or erased? Is the resulting work my own? Credit where credit is due, but who or what gets it? Am I obligated to inform my readers and my songwriting partner? Can sweat equity ever be quantified? What is the value of one person’s original thought and hard labour? This written ragged voice of mine has taken a lifetime of refining. Writer’s block has value too, penalty box time to gather some of the thoughts and ideas out and up there under heaven. I require tools to get them down: pens, notebooks, pads of paper; a stripped-down "kandy-koloured" laptop laps beige electric typewriters at the starting gun – revisions are so much easier to implement as eternally imperfect as they will always be but they are mine.

AI is amoral. Nothing personal despite our human tendency to anthropomorphize everything else in our world. The urgency surrounding a rapidly evolving technology which has lately displayed an alarming propensity to perpetuate enhanced versions of itself, is as Jim and Laura see it, one of governance hindered by a yawning knowledge gap. Times are increasingly weird and we’ve got to turn pro. But how can a business leader or legislator implement or regulate an infinite abstraction of ones and zeros they’re incapable of wrapping their heads around? “Honest to God, it was here last time I looked!”

I never dreamed of encountering Isaac Asimov’s fictional Three Laws of Robotics straight-faced and verbatim in a Globe and Mail business story. Perhaps robot psychology will soon be a viable career option. Why not? Social media influencers can actually make a living now. (Oh man, I would’ve loved to have dropped that pathetic aspiration on my father during one of our chats about my future just to watch his face; alas, said job did not exist in the late 70s. There was always advertising of course.)

I’ve touched on just a few of the many aspects of modern technology that Jim and Laura delve into and decipher in The Human Race for the benefit of others who like me fear what they can’t understand; my automatic reflex is to dismiss and mock, ignore and carry on. I’ve since been reliably informed there’s little or no time for indifferent and snippy jest now because the ever-fluid finish line isn’t preordained to demarcate a brave new toxic dystopia. Anyway, we’ve enough islands of that ilk around already.      

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.