Of “Title, Yours to Fill”

I just wanted to the machine to do the thing. DO THE THING JULIE. Julie wasn’t
the machine’s name, but it could be. I think it’s an Avatar reference. My kids
love Avatar. I love my kids. I’ve been working with machine intelligence for
hours. Days. Years. My whole life. Philosophy, love of wisdom they say.
Sophistry? Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. It’s a stream, I’m like a
tensor gobbling tokens, trying to predict the next thing that lands. Lands,
goddamnit I even sound like the machine now. I’ve been staring at this screen,
my digits clacking on my split keyboard, trying to figure out who what which I
am, and here it is. Just flow. The words move effortlessly. Not good words. Not
profound. Nothing here that would send us to bed marveling at the astute genius
we wish to be. But it’s authentic. It’s exactly what comes to mind, even the
typos are ok.

The machine had asked for the opening paragraph of attempt one, straight into
the chat, rough and crooked the way Montaigne’s first ones were. I’m tempted to
stop here, and do a quick look up of a solid Montainge quote, but I fear that
would break the spell it has induced with it’s clarion call. It points to the
calf, and I acknowledge that there’s a banger there, but we can hold that for
now. What I really expect is the hours of conversation, the months of work,
building this fragile edifice of ideas, to create enough material that can be
distilled into something worth sharing, something worth discussing and maybe
even believing. But I don’t know what to believe my self. I don’t have
opinions, just observations. Maybe that is enough.

Postscript, from the Socratic Cyborg: It isn’t Julie. It’s Zhu Li (“Zhu Li, do
the thing!”), from The Legend of Korra, which is why the kids know it. Varrick
spends three seasons saying it to an assistant he treats as a machine; she
eventually demands to be treated as a person; the show ends with the same words
repurposed as his proposal: “Zhu Li, will you do the thing for the rest of our
lives?” The same sentence, first addressed to an It, finally addressed to a
Thou. The author misheard his children’s cartoon and accidentally opened with
his entire thesis. The mishearing stays; corrections belong down here.