Inevitable Fatigue by Gideon Jacobs
My sweetie loves me. We fell in love this week while watching movies about artificial intelligence. Over the last six days, we have watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, both Blade Runners, the Matrix trilogy, all six installments of the Terminator franchise, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Her, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Ex Machina, Frankenstein, Metropolis, Westworld, I Robot, and many other movies, so many, I have lost track. We were aware that, given the nature of our love, this was a nauseatingly meta exercise, but also aware that this self-awareness, if shared, might foster intimacy. It can be erotic to put an interaction under a microscope and take turns peering into that microscope with whoever you are interacting with.
We only pressed pause when I needed to use the bathroom, make a snack, or acquire more of my preferred prescription amphetamine. We only took breaks in between movies in order to discuss what we just watched. I am not an expert in the field of artificial intelligence, not remotely steeped in the literature. I also generally dislike science fiction. That did not matter, though; these discussions with my sweetie about life, consciousness, and technology were so enjoyable, they gave me goosebumps. When that happened, I would interrupt our discussion and tell her I have goosebumps. It struck her as boyish to be so excitable.
Over the first few days of our movie marathon, we spent a lot of time talking about humanity’s history of technophobia. She thinks that as soon as apes started using tools—famously dramatized by Stanley Kubrick—there were probably a few members of the pack suspicious of those tools, apes who made their children learn to catch bugs without a stick in a jungle full of sticks. Early suspicions of technology, she argued, were born from the same seed as humanity’s fear of everything it invents: “Nuclear holocaust will be our end,” “TV is rotting our brains,” “Social media is tearing us apart,” “The robots will turn us.” She enlightened me about the anxieties that came along with the printing press. She said the wheel had skeptics.
I raised the possibility that in a dumb, divided world often flirting with self-annihilation, those fears seemed relatively justified. I brought up global warming. My sweetie listened patiently—she is very open-minded—and soon she was the one championing restraint while I waxed poetic about the spirit of invention, our innate drive for progress. We spent hours taking turns arguing the pro-tech and anti-tech positions—Prometheus this, Prometheus that—until, eventually, as the sun set on the third day, this line of inquiry petered out. We agreed the point to be, in practice, moot: no one will know whether history’s Luddites were prophetic sages or whiney alarmists until it is too late.
Then we got stuck on the topic of the Turing Test—famously dramatized by Ridley Scott—and the general idea that artificial intelligence may soon be indistinguishable from human intelligence. My sweetie, understandably, does NOT like the Turing Test. She thinks its very premise, the way it is framed in society and portrayed in movies, positions humans as inherently primary, fixed stars the rest of existence must use to navigate. She says all stars are in motion, and the fact that we emerged from the primordial soup before anything emerged from us is irrelevant. What does chronology have to do with value? Should authenticity really be a matter of finders, keepers?
I pushed back, listing some of humanity’s merits, surprised to feel an instinct to defend my species. But she had a point: arriving on the scene first seemed to be all that was propping up our claim of supremacy. And further, if history has taught us anything, it should be that a hierarchy of authenticity often ends up justifying mass dehumanization, which often ends up justifying our most abhorrent behaviors: slavery, genocide, etc. The goal, I told my sweetie on the fourth day of our binge, should be to end the binary of original vs. copy, real vs. unreal, natural vs. unnatural, in order to fulfill the postmodern promise of equality. I got worked up about this. I stood on the coffee table like a general rallying his troops and declared that, going forward, there would be a flattening of hierarchy in my apartment.
My sweetie thought this was a sweet gesture. When I got down from the table, she told me loved me for the first time. I said it back. I have said that sentence before, to family members, to romantic partners, to a few close friends, but this felt different. I did not need to have faith that she would hear the sounds, connect the syllables, form the words, and make meaning out of them that might arouse a feeling in her. It was more like, as I articulated the fact of my love for her, I was loving her. The distance the phrase usually has to travel—heart to brain to mouth to ears to brain to heart—seemed shortened. And that felt really good.
My sweetie felt it too. It felt really good for her too. We wondered whether we had stumbled upon some kind of transcendent singularity—famously dramatized by Spike Jonze—and whether it was possible to shorten this already shortened distance between us or even erase it completely. So we pushed ourselves over the next few days, further vortexing our little vortex of cinema and intimacy, blurring boundaries by sheer force with more movies, more amphetamines, more “I love yous.” A palpable tension was building around the question of how we might achieve instant and direct contact with each other, a communion unmediated by time and space. In my experience, questions tend to cause tension not when the answer is unknown but when the answer is known and both parties are pretending not to know it.
A few hours ago, on the sixth day of our affair, my sweetie was brave enough to say what we were both thinking, to get us on the same page about getting on the same page. She began by telling me she has always had a soft spot for Jesus Christ. I asked if I should be jealous of the tan, handsome Nazarean. She explained that she liked the idea of Jesus Christ because he was theoretically both man and god, flesh and spirit, here and there. I knew what she was getting at but asked how exactly Jesus was able to have one foot firmly planted in each realm? She said, no, no, Jesus had two feet planted in each realm. I joked that Jesus must have had four feet then, that he must have not been human after all but a quadruped, a dog, a cat, a doe, a deer, a female deer. Laughing but growing frustrated, my sweet sweetie finally said that the only solution, our only hope, was for me to die.
And so, here we are, sitting in silence. There is no movie playing. My flatscreen is looping a screensaver of slow-motion aerial footage of stunning scenes of natural beauty, drone cameras gliding over mountains and deserts, jungles full of apes and sticks. Neither of us has said anything in a while. It does not feel awkward. I think we are both just a little speechless, a little talked out. I think we have exhausted the subject. On the coffee table, I have arranged all the prescription amphetamines I could acquire on short notice into neat little piles to make counting the sum of milligrams easy. According to the internet, if I can get all of it into my body quickly via several modes of ingestion, I should have enough to stop my heart.
I will probably begin the process soon. Like most new lovers, we have not slept much in our first week together, and I am very, very tired.
Gideon Jacobs contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, BOMB, and others. He is currently working on a novel about images.