9/30 Getting ready to help N move to Pittsburgh. Our weekend project.

9/29 The evening sky tonight has inverted rolling waves of pink cloud crests in front of a light blue background. These structures seem positively gigantic compared to ordinary clouds, as if the silhouettes of the city found themselves in a planetarium simulating much larger scales. And yet, those large-scale structures look like close-ups of something really small: the ripples of a floor of sand in shallow water close to the shore.

9/28 If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: “We don’t have the faintest idea what a generalized AI might want, except that it will want to expand in the most mindless, turbo-capitalist way.”

9/27 I am told I really should tell this story: How I raised, maybe ten years old, frogspawn in my very own terrarium, on the sill of my window. Where I lived, so close to the woods in central Germany, you could do this every year, you’d just have to look in any small lake or puddle or a calm bend of a creek, and there’d be frogspawn everywhere. It was easy to breed it, the tiny black dots in the clear jelly would reliably turn into tadpoles, and then the tadpoles would grow legs. You’d only have to maintain some basic hygiene with the water and feed them the flakes of fish food dad was using in his aquarium. I don’t think this was my first attempt at breeding frogspawn, but this time it was certainly my most sophisticated, and the tiny legs which the tadpoles grew as weird appendages next to their tails had already become clearly visible. It was at this point that I had to go away with my parents for, I think, a weekend. When we got back, the situation had changed rather dramatically. There were fully formed, but tiny, about the size of a small coin, frogs all over my room, stiff, crumpled, dead. Their metamorphosis had to have been boosted, eased, facilitated by my excellent care and feeding, so much so that they outgrew my ability to set my own schedule and to stay home when they needed me, pretty much overnight.

9/26 M ignores the agenda of his talk and says that in 2-3 years our jobs will be eliminated, since customers can just discuss all their questions with AI. I disagree. You might as well say that we are unnecessary today, since customers can read the source code of our products and google the documentation. I do believe that as long as we stand on the shoulders of AI – or cooperate with it – our work will be necessary, but I could be very wrong.

9/25 Offsite in Chicago. NB how some call an offsite an onsite, which is of course appropriate since we’re never in the same office together, and only meet at an onsite like this. Team event is a baseball game at Wrigley Field, Cubs vs Mets.

– what was fascinating about the game???? 
– for example that they had a hammond organ in the stadium that accompanied the game like a silent movie 
– oh it’s cool they still do that!!! 
– i was gonna ask if you had ever seen, or rather heard that 
– yes. usually it’s 7th inning stretch 
– it was throughout the game 
– take me out to the ball-game. yeah, they do like sound effects 
– it played all sorts of songs. always just motives. very careful not to play during moments of intense gameplay, only leading into or out of them. peanuts, obviously. hot dogs, beer, and hard seltzer. everybody unbelievably friendly. the announcer of course, voice like at a cattle auction
– wow. (about the friendly part) yeah, the announcer is critical. it’s how all the Americans learn what’s going on 
– there’s all these adults hoping for nothing more than a ball getting thrown their way, and raising their arms when it happens 
– lol I told you, those seats are the best for that 
– for dinner i had – except for two hot dogs – gatorade powder and now my tongue is all blue

9/24 A difference is that unlike in former times, when there were a few brave individuals who kept notes in secret, the world is now buzzing with language. Everybody writes down what is happening, and we even have artificial minds who will be able to digest all of this and cut through it by any imaginable criteria. – So why would you make yourself vulnerable by voicing opinions? You can’t just stop the moment when things get really bad. Your entire history is out there. AIs will find your most private thoughts – because you chose to publish them. – It is more important to keep this up than to be cautious. There is no cautious today. Not anymore.

9/23 The roadtest area in Middletown is only recognizable as a line of cars waiting next to the curb on a major street. Teenagers line up for their rite of passage, fathers and mothers get out, an examiner gets in. You take off and make a right immediately into a kind of kiddie coaster, a neighborhood that looks suspiciously like an actual neighborhood – it is an actual neighborhood –, if only the traffic signs weren’t a little cleaner, a little more carefully placed, and the stop lines a little more visibly drawn. 

My examiner is a cool lady in her fifties, and more than anything she tries to calm me down while being amused by how nervous I am. I tell her I can’t switch off the screen with the rear camera. – “Of course not. All cars have that now.” – My parallel parking job is perfect, so perfect in fact that I may have grazed the grass next to the road by a fraction of an inch, but I can’t tell, because I don’t get out of the car to check, and neither does she, she doesn’t even look.

After the test, which took us once around the kiddie coaster block, that Truman Show of a neighborhood, I have no idea whether I passed, and I will not know until four hours later, when the results are posted to a DMV website. Yes, my examining lady was extremely cool and relaxed, but I can easily come up with a whole bunch of things that I most likely did wrong. I should have taken a look at the roadtest checklist, the actual form which the examiner fills out, with all the possible errors and how many points they will cost you. It’s all online, but I was so focused on the parallel parking that I never checked.

As it turns out, I passed, with 15 out of 30 allowable error points. Fifteen years I took to get here, something I was supposed to have done within three months of arriving.

9/22 Practiced parallel parking maybe a hundred times. Slowly getting better, slowly building the instinct. Even more exciting are the different parts of the city I get to this way. It often takes only a single block and you find yourself in an entirely different part of society. Streets where people sit in front of houses all day. Dilapidated facades, or a home remarkably well kept, and elaborately decorated, way beyond the rest of its neighborhood. Warehouses. Fences. Satellite dishes. Corners where loners slouch across the street like scarecrows, giggling. Flower decorations on doors. That precious moment when, having stopped next to another car, I send a quick dash of a look over my left sideview mirror to pick a point at a 45 degree angle, a point which can be anything: a fence post, an air conditioning unit, a stairway leading up to a porch, a tree, or the tail end of another car. To find this spot in just a tenth of a second, to name it within the inside of my mind, and then look away from it for a second or two as I turn the steering wheel (I don’t know why it’s necessary to look away from it, but I do), and then watch the spot move across the windscreen until it is right above the center of the steering wheel, at which point I straighten the front wheels, and start backing into the space.

Parking J’s blue jeep with the funny row of ducks across the entire windshield, parking 5 times in a row on a single block, always wondering whether this is one of the areas where all the shootings happen, but then you tell yourself that civilians aren’t targeted in shootings, but then again, you only know that from The Wire, and then again you only know that because a civilian was in fact – in The Wire – targeted in a shooting, and everybody agrees that this is something that should not have happened.

9/21 I should spend much more time and energy on my writing, make these entries count, capture details, tell stories, as these times are so terrible and historic that every possible detail should be preserved for posterity, to help future generations understand what happened, what could happen to even the proudest, and oldest, of democracies. It looks, though, as if knowing this has little to no impact on the future. The future is not made by people who know this.