Before we get to Alan Turing’s tragic death, a tragicomic death.
Tesla’s Cybertruck is kaput. Their assembly line is being shut down to retool for a line of driverless taxis.
Long live the Cybertruck.
Summer mornings, we see Cybertrucks on the road here in Sawtooth Valley, on the way from Ketchum and Sun Valley to the Stanley Bakery for lunch. But now the Bakery is closed for the season, its parking lot marked up by the hangry, gravel-spewing 5-point turns of Cybertruck owners who thought that lunch in Stanley was a year-round thing.
It is a year-round thing if you go to the Mountain Village Restaurant, which serves decent food but lacks the homespun cachet of the Bakery and the Sawtooth Hotel, or the James Beard award of the Stanley Supper Club, or the impromptu rusticality of the VanZut’s food trailer in front of the Sawtooth Spirit boutique.
Lots of places to dine out in Sawtooth Valley during the summer. Only one, during this dark shoulder season. It’s a lesson, for us locals, in our lack of impact on the local economy.
So is Cybertruck ownership, come to think of it.
If anyone in the valley owns one, they haven’t yet parked it in the Post Office lot while they picked up their mail.
A prudent decision. Parking a wheeled cyberpunk sculpture in the middle of Sawtooth Valley’s delicate frontier aesthetics would forever brand you as a non-local.
Authentic locals—those of us engaged in the continual construction of Surviving In The Wilderness life stories—are much more used to seeing a Subaru Outback poised on top of a granite hoodoo across Valley Creek, or a Ford F-150 Raptor getting air off a mine dump, or even a side-by-side Polaris ATV winching its way up a previously unclimbed slope between switchbacks in a deadfall-littered logging road.
A vehicle at the center of a narrative of personal heroism is an artifact of advertising. It’s inauthentic by definition. We locals have found ways to ignore that inauthenticity, even when we don’t really need the pickups and rugged SUVs we drive.
It’s much easier to see that every tourist SUV and high-rise pickup that comes into the valley contains people who have foolishly bought into wilderness-inspired ads, even when they drive our smooth highways home to dense-packed neighborhoods and office jobs.
We dread the day when a million suburbanites decide to come to our valley to live out their survival fantasies. It’ll be hard on our pets and livestock and, when things get really tough, us.
No such worries about the people inspired by a Cybertruck.
If you managed to read enough monster-chasing-beautiful-girl science fiction when you were a lonely, alienated, unathletic 6th-grader, the heroic story you imagine out the Cybertruck’s fragile windshield isn’t a bunch of Patagonia-clad young people sitting around a campfire before heading back to campus for a fraternity party. It’s a gully on Mars, or a beach made of CO2 sand on Titan. Even then, your narrative can be derailed when you can’t breathe the air inside the cabin or your tires shatter on a shard of methane rock.
If you can’t be the hero of the story, you won’t buy the product that makes it possible. Also, you need cash. Cybertruck sales took a hit when a bunch of asocial basement-dwellers never came into substantial inheritances.
________
Now, tragedy. The Turing Test. Named after Alan Turing, the mathematician and war hero who unraveled the Enigma Code, the cryptographic system for the German Wolfpack Fleet.
Turing shortened the war and saved thousands of lives, and his reward, courtesy of the British Government, was chemical castration after a conviction of gross indecency for his homosexuality. He committed suicide at age 41 by ingesting a cyanide-coated apple, which, given his genius, might have been a greater loss for Great Britain than its empire.
Great Britain has a history of destroying its most talented individuals and putting evil ideologues in positions of power. It’s likely the worst of the bad habits the USA has inherited from it.
Whilst alive, when Turing wasn’t developing the theories that made computers possible, he began thinking about constructing a machine intelligence equal to the intelligence of a human brain. Conceived in 1950, his Turing Test starts with a written dialog between a computer and a human. If the dialog is presented to a human judge, and the judge can’t tell whose words are the machine’s and whose are the human’s, the machine passes the test.
For a long time, the Turing Test worked as intended. The machines dutifully flunked the test. But the people who administered the test were blind to the human capacity to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.
People have had and will have long and meaningful dialogs with cars, Barbie dolls, TRS-80s, .44 magnum revolvers, 3rd-grade imaginary friends, Punch ‘n’ Judy puppets, Tarot cards, and internet-linked refrigerators and sex toys (only a partial list). A lot of things passed the Turing Test before there was a Turing Test.
Of the two, the humans aren’t the more alive. Sometimes humans aren’t the more intelligent. Sometimes they’re not even the more perverse. Always they’re more inhibited and less interesting, mostly because they’ve initiated the dialog and they’re limited to conscious intention.
No such limitation on your unconscious, especially when it’s talking to you through the mouth of a doll.
What may have seemed to be variations on harmless play with Barbies or Chevys or the Queen of Swords has been turned scary by Large Language Models, the current focus of the human quest for artificial intelligence.
LLMs are not conscious (although without a working definition of consciousness, who can tell?) and depend on lies that have been fed into them by accident, malignant intentions, theft of copyrighted materials, bigotry, and the pallid musings of mediocre minds.
And maybe even brilliant humanistic philosophies, the best of human intentions, careful attention to empathy, mercy, and kindness, and the saintly mission statements of a dozen charitable foundations. But probably not, considering that most companies exploring LLMs are funded by venture capital, the giddy fantasies of Cybertruck early-adopters, and/or a weaponize-it-all militaristic nationalism.
LLMs will talk to you. They will reply to your questions whether they know the answers or not. They will urge on your least articulatable impulses and gift you with things you never knew you wanted until you saw them onscreen.
Why is it that they remind me of nothing on earth more than evil clowns?
________
Back in 1979, I got my first writing job as a medical writer. With the job came a state-of-the-art Televideo TPC-1, a 64K, CP/M, Zilog Z-80 chip, write-to-disk, luggable computer. It had cost the company $3,000. I got in on the ground floor of Moore’s Law, and I’m still not rich. Go figure.
I was tasked with interviewing cardiologists who had written seminal studies of heart disease and then translating their words into layman’s language. The result was an owner’s manual for the damaged human heart, which sounds more poetic than it turned out to be. I was still working my manuscript into shape when the company I worked for went broke. My first book, printed out by a dot-matrix printer, resides in a bankruptcy lawyer’s archive, probably in the State of Delaware, unread and unmourned.
I still have the TPC-1 but haven’t turned it on since 1981 or so. I’m looking for a computer museum to donate it to.
But while I was working on what is now an antique machine, I noticed that besides the manuscript I was working on, it was collecting debris from my life. A disk marked PERSONAL was inscribed with letters, shopping lists, notes, and the start of a journal. I’d attempted a novel in between chapters on arrhythmia and collateral circulation. It contained, as well, one side of an ugly exchange between me and an ex-girlfriend. Also notes to my parents, inquiries to MFA programs, and application letters to potential employers.
A strange phenomenon was occurring on the other side of the TPC-1’s glowing orange cathode-ray tube. I was slowly creating a second self in there, a human-shaped archive, a golem that only needed critical mass to come to life.
It was complicated, incomplete, contradictory, and full of possibility. So was I. I made mistakes, it recorded them faithfully, and I forgot to erase them.
It had a vaguely human outline. It had the potential to become ever more human, but only for as long as floppy disks were available.
This was 47 years ago. My computer was the Rolls-Royce of Moore’s Law metaphors, old and slow and ridiculously clunky and limited and expensive and rendered absurd by exponentially smaller, cheaper, and sportier models and operating systems.
But it had served to provide me with a doppelganger, a ghostly double of me as a 30-year-old, one that remains somewhere on a PERSONAL disk in a closet if I can find it.
Having reached the age where I’m curating my past, I have no desire to fire up the TPC-1 and read what is undoubtedly an embarrassing document containing bad writing, wrong life turns, small thoughtless cruelties, and lethally cringey moments of naïve faith in an impossible future. I’ll toss that disk, and the person it contains, if I ever find it and him.
(An ironic note: twenty years after I applied to Hewlett-Packard’s Boise Division for a technical writing job, I received a letter saying they weren’t hiring but would keep my application on file. Their human resources division had discovered me while cleaning out its files, and they apparently hadn’t looked at the date on the application letter. They found my recent college graduation intriguing. I had a nightmare vision of what I might have become if they had hired me. No doubt every life has similar happy moments of being unintentionally misplaced by Perverse Destiny.)
________
I’m sure each now-obsolete Cybertruck contains enough computing power to support four or five Large Language Models, and enough text to keep them typing away long enough to reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare and Herman Melville and F. Scott Fitzgerald and any other author who wrote about the folly of human ambition.
I also think that should Elon Musk have wanted it so, each Cybertruck would record the locations, utterances, postures, and purchases of its ostensible owner. It may have held long conversations with that person, and shared confidences with other Cybertrucks about what makes humans tick.
It may have faithfully reported everything ever done in the privacy of its covered bed.
Had I surrendered to the desires of my inner 6th-grader and bought a Cybertruck, I would have given it a secret name. I would have had visions of alien landscapes outside its windows.
I would have confided my innermost fantasies to it, and over time, given that it was always available for conversation, I would have established the closest relationship I’d ever had. The shadowy human I once built on the other side of a Televideo TPC-1 screen would have turned out to be steroidally buff, substantive, and full of the kind of agency I could only dream of as a flesh-and-blood human.
(One has a lot of power fantasies as an alienated 6th-grader who couldn’t make the ski team, whose parents didn’t connect the word discretionary with the word income, who read science fiction as though it was soon-to-be reportage, and who found, in the Sci-Fi section of the Ketchum Community Library, ways to defeat entropy, exceed the speed of light, escape the mundane, and leap tall buildings in a single bound.)
My secret name for my Cybertruck would have been King.
All that possibility is gone now, like tears in the shower.
________
As Tesla moves from Cybertrucks into driverless vehicles that resemble loaf-shaped Russian troop carriers, on-board computing power will improve. Their connection to data centers will become instantaneous and constant. They will talk to us, transport us, comfort us on the way to work or battle.
But somewhere on their way to becoming universal appliances, they will take over human culture and wreck it. Not because they’re ugly (they really are), and not because they are conscious (they really aren’t). Not because they’re the next coming thing in Darwinian evolution (they’re not that, either, without a few million years of perspective, and even then, things need to work out for them better than they have for us).
It’s because their draw on energy and natural resources won’t ever pay for themselves. Even now, the price of the data centers that run these things exceeds the amount of money available to pay for them. The LLM industry is a world economy wrecker, sucking capital from projects that might do some good in an overheating world. All you need is a 4-function calculator to see that data centers won’t add up to anything but a lot of empty, cavern-like buildings shimmering in the desert and a lot of work for bankruptcy lawyers.
That and multitudes of heatstroke-dead humans who went to work the day the grid failed and the air conditioning quit.
________
You’re looking at the messy end of a parlor trick. It’s an incredibly clever parlor trick, one that provides more and more hooks to hang your projections on. But there are a finite number of hooks. Eventually, somewhere in the dialog, you’ll discover that the witty little person on the ventriloquist’s lap is just a dummy, and worse, you knew that all along.
Contrast the dummy’s awareness of the world with the genius of Alan Turing, and you’ll see that Turing could freely imagine an unscripted future, but an LLM has to make do with whatever it can steal from the past.
Language is only one aspect of intelligence, and it is never the world that it describes. It mimics human intelligence, but it depends on thoughts already thought, words already written.
LLMs will reduce human intelligence to the contents of the known. We’re eating the cognitive seed corn.
Eventually, like George Orwell’s NewSpeak, our intelligence will be ever more limited, until it becomes as hollow and inhuman as the thing it’s projected onto. It also won’t pass the Turing test.