Deleted Scene: Laurence and the Futurists
Since All the Birds in the Sky came out, I’ve been posting “deleted scenes” — bits of story that didn’t make it into the final book. These are generally things that got cut for a reason, and they are not a substitute for reading the actual book. I encourage you to read the book first, and then these can hopefully sort of add some more layers of context and enjoyment to the book itself.
That said, what I’m posting today isn’t quite a “deleted scene” — I don’t think I ever intended to include it in the book. But when I came across it yesterday looking for something else, I realized I still really like it. It’s a section where Laurence goes to a futurist conference. And gets attacked with peanuts!
Check it out…
A few weeks later, Laurence and Isobel were on a plane to Seattle, and Laurence was
writing a speech on his caddy. Isobel kept trying not to glare at him: He was
supposed to have written this thing weeks ago, not the day before the
conference. Sure, it was just a ten-minute “spitballer” about posthumanism
and whatnot, but still. This mattered.
They were flying up to attend Milton’s private “next-level
conceptualizers” conference, Future Barn. There were no papers at the
conference, just some “spitballers,” and a lot of “bull
sessions.” And there would also be some private sessions including
Laurence and some of the most next-level of the conceptualizers, people who had
read Milton Dirth’s secret book (that he only printed a dozen copies of.)
“I can’t believe you’re writing it on the plane,”
Isobel said. “I was massively more responsible when I was your age.”
“Like when you took a seven-year-old runaway out to the
middle of nowhere to look at a space rocket?” Laurence said, before
looking back down at his admittedly disorganized notes.
The moment they hauled their overnight bags off the plane,
they were in the bubble. A guy was standing in the Arrivals terminal holding a sign
with the FUTURE BARN logo on it. He was wearing a polo shirt and tuxedo pants,
plus pristine dress shoes, so it was like he’d gotten dressed for a formal dinner
but given up halfway through. “I’m Mitchell.” He shook hands with
Laurence and Isobel, and three other people who’d been on their same flight, in
first class. Seconds later, everybody was talking about humans after humans, the
Singularity, the nine specific limitations that we were all on the verge of
transcending.
They all climbed into a vehicle that was half SUV, half Moon
buggy. There was a full bar in back, but Isobel caught Laurence gazing at it,
and shook her head. Laurence wound up sitting between the founder of a major tech
company and a famous futurist who believed artificial intelligence would fix
all the problems we were too dumb to solve on our own, and we would merge with
it. “It’s just around the corner,” the futurist said,
“artificial intelligence is inevitable. Moore’s law proves it.”
Laurence refrained from saying he’d dabbled in A.I. and
found it just as unreliable as any other kind of intelligence.
They didn’t see much of Seattle, because the van’s windows
were small and tinted, and they drove away from the city in any case, out
towards Olympia. Laurence glimpsed fields and tiny shopping centers and one
sad-looking disco. The futurist and the tech mogul were talking past Laurence,
about the problems with democracy: People will always vote their short-term
interests, not the interests of the species as a whole. Half of the miracle of artificial
intelligences would be how they would usurp our self-government for our own
good, they said. Plus we would be better people when our brains were part
machine, and our thoughts were more curated.
Laurence started zoning out and watching for the glimpses of
rural Washington. He felt a gentle panic building inside him about his
unfinished spitballer.
No worries – Laurence would have plenty of time to finish the
talk in the evening. There was nothing between the opening un-reception and the
dinner a couple hours later. And after dinner, there were a few hours’
“unstructured time” during which Laurence could easily duck out and
write the thing.
They came to an actual barn – although it was shiny and
silver, and was some kind of hydroponic thing where genetically upgraded millet
was being grown in silos, plus there were cows whose story Laurence honestly
did not want to know. That was all the ground floor of the barn, and then there
was an elevator that led you up to the top floor, where there were a handful of
executive suites with couches, Herman Miller chairs and conference tables. The
“un-reception” was in an observation room, a glorified gantry that
looked down on the silos and cow enclosures.
Five hours after the “un-reception” started,
Laurence found himself sitting with an gray-haired woman named Marlene, who ran
the company that made three out of the five external hard drives Laurence owned.
“I expected you to be more intense,” Marlene said, “to hear Milton
talk about you. I expected you to be like Benedict Cumberbatch, but you’re more
like a young Matthew McConaughey. No offense.”
“None taken. That’s pretty much the hottest actor
anyone’s ever compared me to.” Laurence wondered if the CEO was hitting on
him. He still hadn’t had time to work on his spitballer.
“I think all the time about what our descendants will
make of us, if we are lucky enough to have any,” Marlene said. “Whether
they’ll be embarrassed to contemplate our primitive squalor, the limitations we
accepted as absolute.”
“They’ll probably have internetpunk,” Laurence
said.
Laurence’s spitballer was written at three in the morning,
on coffee and chocolate and liquor and little chocolate liquor bottles. It came
out to seven minutes, even with dramatic pauses, and the title was, “We’re
Already as Posthuman as We’re Going to Get.” Laurence wasn’t sure if he
believed this, but he believed it as much as he believed the opposite, and it
was easier to write a debunking speech at three in the morning than a true-believer
one.
Consider the way our brains work, Laurence wrote. Stuff just
pops into your head. You’re often at your smartest when you’re in a kind of
hypnogogic state and things are just bubbling up to the surface. How do you
upgrade that firmware, without rationalizing it, and maybe ruining it? How do
you graft something else onto that? How do you genetically engineer something
better than that? If we get artificial intelligence, it’ll be as compatible
with your brain as your Macbook is with an air-conditioner. At a certain crude
level, the air-conditioner does the same thing the laptop computer does: move information
around, change the amount of information in the system. But that doesn’t mean
you can plug the Macbook into the air-conditioner and achieve anything. Our
brains have already gotten way bigger in the past 150 years, can we really do
this faster than evolution?
The noted futurist threw a peanut at Laurence, a minute or
so into his talk.
And then another peanut. And then another. The first one bounced off
Laurence’s forehead. The second one he caught in his mouth. The third one
nearly went in his eye. Laurence heard Milton Dirth laughing and clapping his
hands together between his knees, over in the corner. Someone else threw a
peanut, and missed. Laurence was standing on cheap gray polyester carpet in a wardroom
over a steel barn, facing thirty-odd people, most of them older than him, and
they were hurling nuts at him. A cashew hit him in the neck and he lost his
place.
The Q&A was brutal. “It’s sad to see the next
generation falling prey to meat-suit thinking,” said one guy with a gray
ponytail. “Defeatism isn’t going to take us to what’s next, only bold
thinking can do that,” said an Asian man with three tufts of white hair
coming out of his otherwise bald head.
“I thought scientists were supposed to question their assumptions,”
Laurence said. Shower of nuts.
At lunch, Milton Dirth kept joking that Laurence had a
peanut allergy. He asked the waiter over and over again if various dishes had
peanuts in them, long after it stopped being funny. Lunch was just Laurence, Isobel,
Milton, Marlene, and a famous hacker named Bert who’d written a scripting
language that Laurence used sometimes.
“We’re going to have lunch from soup to nuts, except in
Laurence’s case,” Milton giggled. “Laurence probably had enough
nuts.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Laurence started to say.
“I mean, I did my best with the assignment, but…”
“You did great,” Milton said, touching
Laurence’s shoulder in a vaguely paternal gesture. “The assignment wasn’t
to tell people what they wanted to hear. It’s good to yank people’s chains
every now and then. It drives them nuts, ha ha ha.”
