Chapter 80 — The Chaos of Her Other Selves
The Curve of Time, Chapter 80 —— The Chaos of Her Other Selves, in which Saskia returns to LA and Mica.
Followed by some musings on predicting the future.
Listen to full episode :
— 80 —
The Chaos of Her Other Selves
Saskia returned her rental early and caught the last flight back to LA. She had had enough of Seattle for one trip.
Back in the city of Angels, she called Mica who convinced her to stop in Santa Monica before heading out to Pasadena.
Over a quickly whipped together late night snack, Saskia admitted to Mica that she was starting to believe that there was a possibility that she couldn’t change past events. “Maybe you’re right, the universe does bend to the improbable to keep consistency.”
Mica bobbed her head side to side.
“What are you thinking?”
“Amara, the meditation retreat guru, he shared something with me.” Mica locked eyes with Saskia. “That you were at his retreat.” There was an unexpected accusation in her voice.
Saskia sat up straighter and gave a nervous laugh.
“He showed me a picture of last week’s attendees.”
“What?”
Mica pulled up the screenshot she’d taken. She turned her phone about for Saskia to see.
Saskia was speechless, but when her voice did return, she was adamant that she hadn’t attended the Santa Cruz retreat.
“Well, I guess that means you haven’t attended yet.”
“Or it was another me.” Saskia’s mind cast back to her dead self that Mica had found earlier. “There was the Jane Doe.”
“She was already dead, and if it’s another you, that looks to me like pretty incontrovertible proof that you can affect the world.”
Saskia, again, denied she had been at the retreat.
“Guess what name you decide to——or she decided to use.”
Saskia looked blankly back at Mica. “I’ve no intention of going.”
“Your middle name.”
The combination of tension and surprise made Saskia chuckle. “That is what I’d do.”
Mica cocked her head, her eyebrows rising as she did.
“I’m pretty sure I saw him once. Years ago. In Berkeley.”
“Who?”
“The monk.”
“Years ago?”
Saskia described the interaction she’d had with the Buddhist monk on University Ave. How it had happened over a decade ago, but that it was a touchstone moment that traveled with her through time. Resonated. “And Sienna, she was me until a couple of weeks ago.”
“What do you mean: she was you?”
Saskia had been caught in a truth she’d been eliding over, though she was never really sure why she’d hidden it. It had started as an innocent little omission. She hadn’t realized that the seed she’d inadvertently stepped into the ground——that she’d let it grow. But grow, it had.
It was time to hack the invasive plant back. “The other me, at Cleo’s. I saw her too.”
“The other you, you saw?”
“Yes.”
It was a testament to the compartmentalization of the human mind that Saskia had held the secret that she’d met her double, and yet still felt that changing the past wasn’t possible. It was the way you might schedule a hair appointment that conflicted with your weekly team check-in, and not realize until the moment you were required at both.
“I went to go comfort you; when you went to the bathroom. You were gone for so long. But the other me, she intercepted me and told me it was a bad idea. So I went back to our table. You didn’t stay much longer after that so——maybe there was nothing for it anyway. Our first date was doomed. Later——there was never a good time to mention it.”
Mica looked hurt.
“The next day, after I went back to watch myself first slip in time——when I returned——that me was just sitting in my kitchen——our kitchen——when I got back.” Saskia was in full confession mode now.
“Wait, what?!”
“I know. I never told you. I should have, but I didn’t.”
A weird thought bubbled into her mind. She suddenly felt sorry for the anthropomorphized LLMs that were always being given a hard time for their hallucinations. Could it be that the root of those anomalies resided in a mirror artifact of our own mind’s ability to harbor inconsistencies?
“The weirdest thing——which I kind of dismissed, because I hadn’t experienced it. You know, how we discount experiences that other people recall. The weirdest part, looking back on it, was that——let’s just call her Sienna——Sienna claimed a bunch of stuff happened in the restroom. Different passes through the same time and place. She remembered them, but I didn’t.”
“Like what?”
“She tried comforting you. Tried showing you we could slip in time. But it never went well. I never experienced what she was describing. I mean I was going to comfort you, but she talked me out of it, so those events just didn’t seem real.”
“So, the universe branches into parallel strands——forks, if you will——and you can somehow slip between those branches?”
“Not deliberately.” Saskia threw her hands in the air. “I’m not even sure if I’m in her branch or she came into mine! I can’t even tell when time is branching. And you’d think that if I was causing it I’d know——somehow.” She put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes before looking directly at Mica again. “Like I told you, when I got here: I was starting to believe I couldn’t change things. Not at all.” Tears started to well in Saskia’s eyes.
With Saskia’s shoulders trembling Mica pulled her into an embrace. “How many of you do you think there are?”
That was chapter 80, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
Thinking about the idea of meeting up with our other selves reminds me of game I used to play as an undergraduate, late in the night, the rather prosaically named: the percentages game. The percentages game consisted of making numerical predictions about your own future and that of your friends. “I will have kids in five years.” Two percent. I suspect an LLM would do better … actually I just asked Gemini and it more or less refused to take part. Talk about hedging! Surely it could make some standard demographic bets with far better outcomes than those based on my late-teens self-knowledge.
Looking back, even more interesting than how off-base I was on certain questions, it is striking all of the outcomes I never even considered. “Will I ever write a book?” for instance.
This kind of reminds me of the variety being the spice of life that I talked about in the commentary ahead of chapter 40. In that case, I chalked the general age of writers up to being correlated with having had life experience to write about. On reflection, however, it might just be that that has been what I’ve been telling myself. Just as likely, is the correlation that middle age has with economic freedom for a swath of the population. Now, if AI accelerates the adoption of Universal Basic Income, perhaps a slew of young people will start clackety clacking away. Who knows?!
In any event, this kind of brings me back to where I left off my commentary a couple of weeks ago. Specifically: why I think worries about our collective job security are bunk.
I actually heard a thoughtful interview with David Autor on this subject on the Possible Podcast the other day. David made a number of really interesting points, but one which I hadn’t heard articulated nearly so clearly was around the speed of transitions. Transition of the human workforce has been happening on steroids for a few hundred years now. Indeed, over that timeframe the most notable shift is our move away from an agrarian workforce (in the early 19th century in the US, about 90-95% of our workforce was devoted to agriculture; today that percentage is around 1%). The interesting note that David made was that if a typical worker works for thirty years, then about three percent of the workforce retires per year. A corollary of that is that if change happens gradually over thirty years then nobody loses their job as long as new people don’t enter whatever sector of the workforce is dying.
The problem with machine learning, is that any disruption might happen really fast.
Still, even if, say, we achieved driverless truck technology today, that would be unlikely to necessarily cause massive retrenchments (despite that being in an industry that employs over three million people in the US, or more than 1% of the total workforce!). Why? Because it will take decades to transition the entire trucking fleet, not least because people will take time to build new trucks, but just as importantly because incumbents are unlikely to simply discard the underlying assets, ie. the trucks currently in use.
A second interesting point that David articulated well was one I’ve long been receptive to: that AI is more about augmenting our human efforts than simple replacement. I can certainly attest to that in my own use of generative features, be they image or text. Indeed, as I’ve noted before, the artwork for this podcast wouldn’t be possible without the help of generative AI. So, in that instance, my output is just richer. Nobody lost their job, because the alternative was merely not having new art each week.
The optimist in me might even hope that we’re at the dawn of an age where representation in the arts is about to flip on its head, demographically speaking.
Who knows?! Whatever else I’ve learnt in my half century wandering about, I’ve come to realizes that the world is a lot less predictable than I would ever have guessed.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
