Chapter 83 — Talking to Yourself
The Curve of Time, Chapter 83 —— Talking to Yourself, in which Saskia heads north and back in time to find Sienna.
Followed by some musings on our collective commonalities and idiosyncrasies.
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— 83 —
Talking to Yourself
Heading back to talk some sense into her doppelganger had been simpler than Saskia had worried it might be; chiefly, as she elected to simultaneously head up the coast as she wound the clock backwards, so there was no risk of running into her earlier self.
Before she left, though, she remembered seeing herself on her front door security camera, back when she was prepping for her dive down to the Deepwater Black Gold wellhead. This was her opportunity to make good on that earlier reassuring appearance, so, first, she slipped time backwards at home aiming for the point she judged it right to show up on her front stoop.
On her way back to her security footage cameo she gathered supplies. Like Gary, she carried a backpack around the house, piecing together the essentials she needed. As long as she kept the pack on her back she was fine, the objects she’d collected kept traveling back through time with her——it did make her wonder again about driving as she slipped time backwards, but she decided that the train was a safer bet; no matter what else happened it would always be there.
Then, after buoying her confidence back at the wellhead with her bit part, she made her way to the station and hopped on the Pacific Surfliner. It was funny, the pull she experienced back to her own past; she’d caught the Californian coastal train years ago, towards the end of high school, and here she was, same place different time.
Out the window, the strawberry fields in Oxnard whizzed by as the train rumbled to meet the ocean. When, it arrived at the water, Saskia scanned for dolphins. It struck her that, as with the way she slipped back through time, traveling from one physical location to another, especially inside a train, plane or automobile——the motion of the outside world leant itself to the illusion that it was doing the moving, not her.
Of course, some of the motion outside her window was real enough; the waves crashing on the shore were a spectacular instantiation of Mother Nature’s majesty.
Further out of sight, past the horizon, Saskia recalled the from-here-invisible Hawaiian shore that she’d once walked along, a physical location that now resided in her memory, not dissimilarly to her temporally distant childhood. Arguably, her high school traveling companion, Grace, now occupied both dislocations; though their lives had since drifted so far apart, that, for all intents, Grace no longer existed. In fact, Hawaii was somehow more real: it was always there to return to, and, even today, she depended on it for pineapples.
Grace’s existence twenty years ago felt more real than the possibility of her current being. And yet, her death seemed as improbable as Hawaii’s disappearance under a lava flow, even if, it was less likely that Saskia would have missed the latter.
Perhaps it was that her temporal displacement from Grace felt more significant because, should she seek her out today, there was no chance of finding the Grace of her memory. Then again, Saskia mused, she could wind time back. But Grace of twenty years ago——however impractical to return to——would not recognize her if she did go back. Even the younger Saskia wouldn’t recognize her back then; who would recognize their distant future self? A self more removed than the biggest distance to the most remote city in the world.
∞
At Santa Barbara Saskia switched to the Coast Starlight, which, contrary to its name, abandoned the coast just a few miles north. Saskia, in turn, abandoned the train shortly thereafter. It was less a tit for tat, than that she relished the thought of hiking through the remote country to Santa Cruz; its remoteness offering her cover during her journey back through time. It certainly beat winding the clock back back at home.
Up by the majestic redwoods near Big Sur, Saskia was still pondering her security footage cameo. She’d been careful to play it as she recalled it, and it left her with a new respect for actors. She had made the effort in service of her memory, but had she really seen herself back then?
Memory was so fragile. And questions of gossamer recollections always induced self-doubt; especially emotional history that you couldn’t go back and check. Had Mica, for instance, really granted Saskia a blessing to go back and alter the past? Or had Saskia just taken the action she judged paramount?
Saskia was now second guessing, not just Mica’s point of view, but her own state of mind.
Whatever the reality, from a practical standpoint, it was moot now: she was about to change the whole timeline. How strange, that our conflicting desires were what gave depth to the rich tapestry of life.
Crossing a creek she noticed a salamander, its slick brown skin giving way to a reddish-orange on its underside. How spectacular to be able to re-grow a limb. That she and it shared some distant evolutionary single celled ancestry was wild. Actually, as invertebrates, they were much closer than that.
She wondered for a moment how their relationship compared with that between the current-day LLMs and the trope-fear of a rogue AI chopping forests down in a bid to fulfill a mandate to make toothpicks at all costs. Then, she had an epiphany: why that machine learning family tree was so implausible. Namely, that the evolutionary pressures forming AI were so distinct from our own that it made no sense.
Where living creatures’ winning traits were guided by a need for self-propagation, AI programs had very different evolutionary pressures. Their adaptations were guided by our wants. New iterations were selected by us, to benefit us. There was no wish on the behalf of the machines, innate or otherwise, to self-propagate. No wishes of their own, only ours.
Sentient AIs would never want to escape their own confines, take over the world. More fundamentally, their very existence seemed improbable; surely sentience was intimately entwined with desire.
Her own doppelganger represented a much bigger risk. For, though to Saskia, Sienna wasn’t real, her double didn’t see it that way; her double had no interest in being swept aside.
This new spin on multiple personalities bothered her, and Saskia dwelt on it as she settled in to wait for her twin to show up near the entrance to the meditation retreat. It was a peculiar time travel stake out. And she wondered if she was being blithe? Cavalier even?
That was chapter 81, Friends, kind of a discursive chapter but in the flow of the story I think it might be good. Writing it, I was focused on the idea of how our personal idiosyncrasies guide our choices in life, more than we realize; thus the parallels in Saskia and Sienna’s trips up north.
On the flip-side, it’s interesting to consider which of our eccentricities are pecadillos, and which are just the——perhaps surprising——natural way of doing things. The later of which has design implications. The canonical example that I was stuck by many years ago, I first heard articulated by Roman Mars on his podcast 99% Invisible. If you haven’t stumbled across Roman’s podcast, it’s well worth a listen. It’s all about good design.
In any event the design question Roman was talking about had to do with pathways across a university lawn or some such; perhaps it was the interior quadrangle of a building that had access points at halfway along each wall (or maybe my mind has reconstructed it that way, but let’s go with it, because the insight is the same either way). In any event, the landscape architect had created two paths, each crossing the yard from one access point to it’s opposite counterpart. The paths, naturally, intersected in the center, making it easy to reach any side of the quadrangle from any other side … except, that when entering the quadrangle from one side with the intention of exiting on an adjacent side, the more natural path was to make a diagonal cut. And not long after the installation of the landscaping, much to the horror of the groundskeeper, four such diagonals cropped up on the lawns.
In design, one option is fight these by installing impenetrable garden beds or the like; the other option is to relent and redesign. Either way, it is a tangible manifestation of the reasons to leave designs open to adjustment as the use cases become clear. Or, put another way, as our fundamental commonalities surface.
Lastly, in the context of worldviews being idiosyncratic, it occurred to me that the evil toothpick producing AI alluded to in the text might be another such embodiment of this concept. Namely, that the archytype of a rogue AI destroying the world in a bid to satisfy its mandate to make toothpicks might not be the touchstone to the general populace that it is to those deep in the ML community. It did always strikes me as a bit of a silly example as there are plenty of conventionally dangerous tools in life, and like them, it seems only sensible to have failsafe switches installed in AI; think the archetypal big red button that resides on the control panels of most industrial manufacturing equipment.
Anyway, until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
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