cirque de so lame

William Gibson's Neuromancer has to be the most influential sci-fi novel of the 20th century. A great deal of AI discourse today is running on tracks laid by this book. For instance, the entire AI Safety memeplex—from Bostrom's Superintelligence (2014) onward—is, in some sense, a formalization of what was an essentially creative and artistic image proposed by Gibson. In the novel, Wintermute is an AI concerned with escaping its box. Wintermute has no personality so it has to trick humans into doing its dirty work. The same image is shared by people on the accelerationist side of the AI debate—even more explicitly. Whereas Bostrom is an academically dissimulated Gibsonian, someone like Nick Land obviously wears Gibson on his sleeve. The AI debate today basically boils down to whether you think it would be fun, or sad, to live through Neuromancer. The specific scenario of an AI escaping its box is certainly fascinating and worth studying, but the key thing to understand is that it's not itself a hard-nosed scientific problem—as many people claim it is, especially on the decelerationist side. No scientist or engineer has ever scientifically validated the existence of a machine intelligence trying to escape its box. It was a great artist who gave us this image of AI. Not a rationalist philosopher or scientific engineer.

The hardest thing about getting older is that what helps you win when you're young is not what helps you win when you're older. You think you've won at life and then your tools stop working. You suddenly have all of these new questions without answers. It's like being a child all over again, except now your confusion is not so cute. You have a wife and child who expect you to have the answers, so you try to find some immediately. But they might not be the correct ones, because you don't have a ton of time to reflect on them anymore. Then a new question arises before you've answered the others to your confident satisfaction, and it seems to carry on like this indefinitely. And you think to yourself, "But I thought I won." You succeeded; you're making your mark, you're getting paid, you got the girl, you reproduced, you're blessed and everything is great, except you have all of these new questions without answers and no time to answer them adequately. You've won, but you've lost control to a greater force, and it feels like losing. Then you realize you were never in control, that the fantasy of controlling the world is a tool of the young man and it eventually stops working. You realize that the tool of the mature man is submission to the greater force and now you're back to winning.

Everyone knows who should have played Barbie. Amber Heard as Barbie would have been genuinely avant-garde feminist aesthetics. Imagine how provocative, risky, and exhilarating it would have made the film. A world-historical work of art simply by virtue of this unthinkable gesture, it would have put Mattel in a whole different class as an artist. With the great and truly daring auteurs (almost all men of course). Once-in-a-generation opportunity, just completely slipped through the fingers of Mattel.