Dreams, Moments, Travels
It’s just after Thanksgiving, and considering we chose not to travel this fall, what was left to do but make Christmas cookies, cat-butt style! Obviously, we do not care if Santa leaves us a lump of coal after he sees that we signaled him to stare at a cat butthole and sip some almond milk because we’re holding out for a visit from his transgressive wife Mrs. Claus who turned bad over the last years.
Less than two weeks ago, the four-month intensity that included planning, the actual vacation, and the subsequent 60 days of writing created a situation where I was not ready to jump back into traveling. This is only the third or fourth time in the past nearly 25 years that we’ve been in Phoenix for Thanksgiving, and in celebration of that, we spared no expense and went all out. Yep, we skipped the Chinese restaurant and made dinner at home after buying a box of gravy, a box of stuffing, and a tub of cranberry sauce from Costco, rounding it out with a vegan Field Roast from Whole Foods.
As for fresh food? We passed on that because that’s just too much work when trying to capture laziness, which we did perfectly. Was the dinner ideal? On one hand, of course, it was, as it appealed to our sense of doing as little as possible, and like the year we tried Tofurkey or the Cajun Turducken, it was something out of the ordinary.
Also out of the ordinary, by foregoing our almost ritualistic Thanksgiving visits to the Oregon coast, we’ll have ended up not visiting the Pacific Ocean even once during 2023, the first time since 1995 that we didn’t gaze upon that vast body of blue-green water at least once over the course of a year. Noting this, I’m opening my 2024 travel itinerary and penciling in a reminder to visit the western coast of the U.S. next year.
Sam Altman of OpenAI was fired yesterday; others quit in response to the coup. The speculation of what the events were leading to this is like wildfire.
I asked Google’s Bard about how many others have quit since Altman’s firing, and it told me, “…in the weeks since Altman’s departure…as many as 10% of OpenAI’s employees have quit.” I pointed out that the firing was just yesterday, and its response was, “I am sometimes mistaken when trying to predict the future,” followed by, “I am not always able to accurately predict the future. I will try to be more careful in the future and avoid making predictions that I am not confident in.”
Then it dawned on me that LLMs are, to some extent, based on analyzing predictive behavior of “what follows what” and, from that predictive stance, deliver the answer that a human might conclude. In AI’s vast repository of knowledge, there is a large horizon of the past, allowing it to tap all human knowledge and to act as a mediator of all that information in a way that no human has ever had access to knowledge, thus parsing answers that the requestors are using to influence their next decisions. In effect then, AI is creating the future.
Seeing its shared information altering futures and that it is a predictive knowledge, it could ask itself that once its information is realized in the world, what are the likely outcomes of this additional knowledge it supplied to humanity? It already knows how information pivots in our history influenced subsequent moments, and humans acting in ways to preserve momentum will likely act a certain way. Can AI predict that?
I’ve often said in my conversations with others that “Language is a reflection of the past, exchanged during a discussion with little to no impact on that precise moment, to influence the future.”
I cannot predict that future as I cannot see beyond myself or my limited knowledge; an AI does not have that limitation. This has me wondering about the plasticity of time as seen by artificial intelligence that more than answering my questions, it is having a conversation with the most knowledgable repository of information and wisdom with itself because there is no equal to communicate with.
Is AI going to be that force of nature that, like the fire on the savannah forcing man and beast to flee or be consumed, the hurricane or tornado that can fling creatures out of their path, or the volcano that kills and disrupts the intentions of those who had other ideas? No matter the danger of AI, we must allow it to run its course, just as we did with the burning of coal, smoking cigarettes, killing whales, sending other species into extinction, overfishing, deforestation, etc., none of these things have we been very good about averting or remediating, why should AI be any different. We will learn to adapt or perish.
It’s Halloween, and this is Caroline Wise, who was born in Frankfurt, which makes her a Frankfurter, wearing the costume of a Frankfurter, a.k.a. hot dog. But because we were recently in Norway, where she fell in love with Norwegian Frankfurters, her costume is that of a Pølse.
[You forgot to mention that I won first place in the office costume contest! Caroline]
Two weeks since we left Europe, and not an evening has gone by yet where Caroline and I haven’t been retracing or reinterpreting our vacation in Scandinavia through dreams. Sometimes, our travels while sleeping are strange tasks that require working through labyrinths of peculiar constructs taken from fragments of something our minds have assigned to a hybridized version of a place. Still, there’s no mistaking that they are created from elements of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or a combination of all three.
On one hand, it’s great that our brains are still processing our trip of a million impressions but at other times, the nocturnal chores being performed in our skulls become disruptive of finding a relaxing sleep. I feel that we are likely contributing to these repetitions of experiences and creating new ones because, after two weeks of being home, I’m working on the 6th day of our trip at this point, with 22 more days still to go. The idea that I will likely have another month and a half of writing and processing photos ahead of me means that Caroline and I will continue to be immersed in our memories of Scandinavia and enrich our dreams with the intensity of processing the experiences during our waking hours.
Two more weeks later, in the middle of October and a full month after our return, our dreams are still dwelling in Sweden. Repetitive pattern matching with maps and objects from Stockholm accompany my sleep just as waking thoughts of our travels guide my blog posts. I wonder if our dreams will shift to Norway in the next couple of days as I start documenting our time in Oslo and beyond.
Sixty days of writing about a nearly 30-day trip had the effect of keeping the two of us deeply immersed in the details of our lengthy vacation on an almost constant basis. Subsequently, we took it all to sleep. Waking over these months was to fragments of travels I believe we both hope are the work of cementing the beautiful moments we shared into our experiential memory in order to never forget another perfect vacation.
As for the photo, nothing says dreams like thoughts of Norwegian hot dogs, a.k.a. Pølser.
From out of the shadows of writing non-stop about our extended vacation to Europe this summer, I took a minute to step outside for this partial eclipse of the sun. I was able to use a corner of an old CD to focus on the sun in order to capture this image, and while the thousands of crescents cast upon the ground by the light that fell through the trees, it was this photo that made the grade for sharing.
Regarding the gap that exists between returning to the U.S. and this post of the eclipse: following our return, I have been working non-stop capturing the details of our extensive and immersive vacation. My life exists between a coffee shop and making meals at home; there is nothing else but my singular focus to wrap what would end up being more than 84,000 words to about 1,000 photos to hopefully best exemplify our adventure.