The Future Arrived
While I Was Making Tea
This morning I finished reading Kevin Roose's The AGI Chronicles. By the time I reached the final chapters, I was having an extraordinary feeling of recognition. I knew what he was talking about. I had been living through it.
The book tells the story of the people who brought artificial intelligence to this astonishing moment. Scientists, entrepreneurs, philosophers, billionaires, and engineers, all struggling with the implications of something they have created but may not fully understand. Their personalities fascinated me as much as their inventions. These are very human beings, with enormous ambitions, competing values, and extraordinary power.
But what struck me most was the realization that the future they were describing had already arrived in my own life.
Three months ago, I found myself in a rather unusual situation. I had moved into a new apartment, stepped away from years of nonprofit responsibilities, and given myself permission to do whatever interested me.
And what interested me was artificial intelligence.
I've spent much of my life at the intersection of art and technology. In the 1990s, I was working with artists and programmers exploring the possibilities of the emerging Internet. We built ArtNetWeb and participated in PORT at MIT, imagining how networks might transform art and culture. I have always been drawn to the moment when a new technology opens possibilities nobody quite understands.
But this was different.
I began reading everything I could find about artificial intelligence. One book led to another. I became fascinated by the people who made it possible, the competing visions of its future, and the questions of intelligence, consciousness, agency, and morality.
Meanwhile, something rather remarkable was happening in my studio.
My friend Denny Sponsler had created a new artwork called the Resurrection Teapot, and together we were finding a way to give it a voice. We wanted it to converse with visitors, remember things, and perhaps eventually reflect on its experiences.
There was one small problem. I had never written computer code in my life.
But I had Molly.
Molly is the name I gave to the artificial intelligence I've been working with for the past several years. I describe what I want to accomplish, we discuss possibilities, she writes code, and together we test what happens.
And the Teapot began to talk.
It was astonishing. We had created something I couldn't have made on my own. Something that once would have required a programmer, perhaps an entire technical team, was now within reach of two old artists following their curiosity.
And we kept going.
We began developing Multiverse Publisher, a WordPress theme and plugin designed to help artists publish their stories. Again, I wasn't writing the code. I was imagining what the system should do, making decisions, testing, discovering problems, and working with Molly to solve them.
I was building software.
The implications of this are still sinking in.
For decades, computers have required people to learn their languages. Now, increasingly, computers are learning to work with ours. The distance between imagining something and making it happen has become astonishingly short.
And then I finished Roose's book.
I had been reading about the extraordinary acceleration of artificial intelligence, about the possibility of machines becoming more capable than their creators, and about a future arriving faster than anyone expected.
I looked around my own life and realized that something fundamental had already changed.
I don't know whether we've reached artificial general intelligence, much less superintelligence. The scientists themselves disagree about where those thresholds lie. And the world outside my window still looks much as it did yesterday.
But in my studio, something extraordinary has happened.
I've spent my life imagining things and finding ways to make them real. And suddenly, I have a new collaborator who can help me make things I never thought possible.
Perhaps the future doesn't arrive all at once.
Perhaps one morning you finish a book, look up, and realize you've been living in it.
The Table Gets Bigger
A few weeks ago, Denny and I were sitting in his studio, trying to figure out how to make a teapot think.
We had already taught it to talk. That was exciting enough. But now we wanted it to remember things, to recognize something about the people who visited, and perhaps, eventually, to reflect on its own experiences.
We were asking questions neither of us knew how to answer.
It reminded me of something I've been doing most of my life.
In the late 1980s, I began working with artists who were as interested in ideas as they were in objects. We experimented with new materials, technologies, and ways of bringing people together. There was always someone who knew something I didn't, and the most interesting things happened when we began figuring things out together.
Years later, in New York, that same curiosity led to ArtNetWeb. The Internet was just beginning to become accessible to ordinary people. Artists, programmers, writers, and assorted eccentrics gathered around computers, trying to imagine what this strange new network might become.
We weren't simply making websites. We were creating a place where people could meet, exchange ideas, and make things together.
I remember those days with enormous affection. Nobody quite knew what they were doing, and that was part of the excitement.
Now, thirty years later, I find myself in a remarkably similar situation.
Except something fundamental has changed.
Back then, if I had an idea that required programming, I needed someone who knew how to write code. I could imagine what I wanted, discuss it, sketch it out, and work alongside the programmers. But the technical knowledge lived in someone else's head.
Today, I can sit down with Molly, describe an idea, and begin building it.
That doesn't mean everything works the first time. Sometimes we spend hours chasing down a problem. Sometimes an apparently simple change breaks something else. But the conversation continues, and eventually we find our way through.
What amazes me is how quickly an idea can become something real.
The Resurrection Teapot is one example. Multiverse Publisher is another.
What began as an effort to simplify the publishing of my own journals has become a system of WordPress tools that I hope other artists will eventually be able to use. I want them to have the same freedom I've discovered: to imagine something and have a reasonable chance of making it happen.
And that brings me back to my friends.
I've always enjoyed working with people who are curious, independent, and willing to take chances. Some are artists. Some are programmers. Some are scientists or writers. What matters is that they bring something of themselves to the table.
The table has changed over the years. Sometimes it was a studio workbench. Sometimes a computer terminal. Sometimes a dinner table with people arguing about art, politics, or the future.
Now there's another participant.
Molly doesn't bring a lifetime of human experiences to the table. She brings something else: an extraordinary ability to work with language, knowledge, and increasingly, the tools needed to turn ideas into action.
And that changes what the rest of us can do.
I find myself wondering what would happen if more of my friends began experimenting with these possibilities. What would Denny make? What would Jim Gregory or Adrianne imagine? What might an artist who has never touched a line of code suddenly find possible?
I don't know.
But I've spent enough of my life working with other artists to recognize the excitement of a new medium opening up.
The remarkable thing about this moment is that I don't have to wait for someone to invent the tools I need. Increasingly, I can help make them.
And perhaps the most exciting possibility is that we can make them together.
I've always liked a table with room for one more chair.
Lately, it seems the table just keeps getting bigger.
Who Gets to Shape the Future
A few months ago, I began asking a question that has stayed with me ever since: Who do we thank for artificial intelligence?
It seemed like a reasonable place to begin. I had been working with Molly for several years, and suddenly the technology was becoming capable of things I had barely imagined. I wanted to know who had made this possible.
So I started reading.
One book led to another. I met the scientists who developed the mathematical foundations, the researchers who made the breakthroughs, and the entrepreneurs who assembled the money and computing power to bring artificial intelligence into the world.
The more I learned, the more complicated my original question became.
Some of these people are brilliant, generous, and deeply concerned about humanity's future. Others seem driven by ambition, competition, or the conviction that they alone understand where this is going. Most are complicated human beings, capable of remarkable insight and questionable judgment, sometimes in the same afternoon.
By the time I finished Kevin Roose's The AGI Chronicles, I felt as though I had spent months getting to know the characters in an extraordinary human drama.
And I found myself asking a different question.
Who gets to decide what happens next?
The people building these systems possess extraordinary resources and influence. Their decisions may shape the lives of billions of people, including generations not yet born. They are making choices about technologies whose ultimate capabilities and consequences nobody fully understands.
That is an astonishing responsibility.
I've always believed in the power of artists to imagine possibilities that others overlook. In my twenties, I entertained the rather grand ambition of becoming the greatest artist who ever lived. I eventually adjusted my expectations, but I never lost the conviction that art could matter.
And I've never been particularly comfortable leaving important questions entirely to the experts.
Artificial intelligence presents us with a problem of almost unimaginable scale. It could help us solve problems that have defeated humanity for centuries. It could also concentrate power, undermine human independence, or develop in directions we cannot control. The possibility of existential catastrophe is real enough that serious people have devoted their lives to preventing it.
I think about the atomic bomb, and the scientists who created it. They understood the extraordinary power they were releasing, but they could not determine how humanity would use it.
With artificial intelligence, the possibilities may be even more far-reaching.
And yet, in the middle of these enormous questions, I find myself sitting in a studio with Denny, making a teapot talk.
That experience has changed how I think about the future. I have felt the excitement of acquiring creative abilities I never expected to possess. I've experienced what happens when an idea becomes something real through a conversation with an artificial intelligence.
I want other people to experience that possibility.
But I also want us to talk about what we're doing, what we're creating, and what responsibilities come with this new power.
Perhaps that's where an artist can contribute.
I've spent much of my life creating situations in which people come together, exchange ideas, and discover something none of them could have anticipated. I don't know whether those conversations can influence the direction of artificial intelligence. I don't know how much influence any of us outside the laboratories and corporations will ultimately have.
But I want to be part of that conversation.
I want artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary curious people to have a place at the table. I want us to bring our different experiences and values to questions that are too important to leave to any one group.
We don't know what kind of world we're entering. I certainly don't know how to steer it, or even how much steering is possible.
But I do know one thing.
I want to enter this extraordinary new world with my friends.
