Notes From the Road: Robotopia, And Other Fables

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There’s this thing that happens, every time I see a little bit of light on the horizon.

See, the universe is always listening. Or, if you prefer, you can call it fate, call it God. Depending on how it goes, maybe you think it’s demons, or even the minions of the Goblin Kingdom if it tickles your fancy.

Whatever it is, it actually does have some kind of power over you. Poor Sarah was wrong about that part.

I don’t claim to know how it works. I only know that once the scarcest of optimistic words cross my lips, or escape the tip of my fingers as they dance to the pulsing glow of backlit keys, strange, unseen machinery begins rumbling to life. It maneuvers the currents of reality into dark pools and eddies, complex patterns emerge, twisting the screws until I’m ruminating again. And from ruminating, as everybody knows, it’s only a hop skip and a jump to brooding.

“Better to be an optimist and be wrong than a pessimist and be right.”

I heard Elon Musk say that on a podcast today. He was talking with some other very smart guys about a future full of robots and AI-provided abundance where everyone gets everything they want for free and we all live to be a-hundred-and-sixty years old. Apparently, nobody will have to go to medical school anymore because the robots will all be amazing surgeons with steady hands and we’re going to launch a million tons of shit into orbit every year on rockets that burst free of the gravity well around the clock. You see, our new AI overlords are going to have to live in space, where the Sun never stops shining, because the Sun is an uber-gargantuan fusion reactor that gives them unlimited energy for free.

Elon calls AI and robotics the “Supersonic Tsunami,” and he says he stopped being pessimistic and chose bright-side fatalism instead. Said he had to do it, on account of the fact that nobody else who was building the replacement for mankind wanted to slow the hell down. Felt like he had no choice but to join the party and try to keep the whole careening dumpster fire from going off the rails completely and killing us all.

And oh, by the way, this is not some far-flung future. It’s all going to happen in the next three to five years. There really isn’t even much time left for just plain-old freaking out.

All of this is on my mind, has been on my mind for quite a while now, but this podcast I’ve been listening to really drove it home.

Still, it’s not the reason I’m in a funk tonight.

I’m in a funk for the same reason as always. Can’t stop circling the same drain. Every time I think I’m going to break free, like those gleaming stainless steel rockets of Elon’s pushing off the planet with 100 gigawatts of pure kerosine thrust, something happens and things go sideways and I spiral back to earth. Maybe that’s just part of the iterative process. God knows SpaceX blew up a lot of rockets along the way.

But the litany comes back to haunt me anyway. Constant reminders of being erased from a shared life. The ghost sensation of plump little baby cheeks on my lips where I used to kiss my son goodnight. The ache from not feeling his small body next to mine in the big king-sized bed, and the utter inability to fill the space he used to take by substituting a pillow I can wrap my arms around. It’s like trying to soothe a phantom limb. The vacant place where the random hugs from my sweet little messy ten-year-old daughter used to go, preceded by an announcement of “HUG!”, as she’d bury her face with the pink, flower-shaped glasses into my shirt, wrapping her skinny arms around her father’s bulk. The missed conversations and jokes with my older kids that have been replaced by endless silence, their laughter no longer echoing down the stairs when they’re supposed to be asleep.

Everyone tells you to cherish it before it’s gone, but nobody tells you that someone can just take it all away before it’s even finished.

I wonder about how I could have been so sure about the things that led me here, and yet gotten it all so wrong. I feel the sting of self-recrimination for not seeing it sooner. There are too many mornings where I wake up feeling like something has gone wrong and I’m the last man alive on earth, left alone because everyone went somewhere else without me while I was asleep. Gone is any feeling of belonging, meaning, purpose, or direction. Just Groundhog Day after Groundhog Day, repeating the same patterns, ad nauseam, hoping to find some way to break free of the thoughts and emotions that are chaining me down.

I was driving when this wave hit, and I’m left trying to quickly wipe the tears from my eyes as I pull up to an intersection. I see a woman in a compact car stop parallel to me, two lanes to my right. I glance over and I think she’s staring at me, but I don’t want to make eye contact so I quit fussing with my eyes and look straight ahead. The next time I glance over, she’s pulling her visor down, trying to shield her eyes from the direct and overwhelming glare of the setting sun. She doesn’t even realize she has a green light. She’s just parked, right there in her lane. I take my left hand turn and don’t look back.

I stop at a fancy apartment building done up in a quasi-neoclassical style. It gives off an ambience of sheer mass in exactly the way my own rinky-dink apartment building does not. I climb the solid concrete steps past some impressive flowerpots to the huge, heavy, glass-inlaid wooden doors. The instructions say to leave the delivery in the lobby, but the door is locked. A woman with a small dog who looks like she doesn’t know what to make of the wayward bearded giant at the entrance to her building nevertheless goes against her better judgment and lets me inside. I find a granite countertop with a pile of other deliveries stacked messily on top, and shove mine into a gap.

On my way to the next destination, I drive down a road I’ve never seen, passing by houses that look like contemporary castles. My entire place would no doubt fit inside their walk-in closets with room to spare. Dappled sunlight scatters across my windshield from the trees. I turn on an audiobook that gives information about unexplained phenomena in clinical detail, like a textbook about the paranormal and bizarre. My stereo still isn’t fixed, but I have the audio routed through a neat little Bluetooth speaker I picked up off of Amazon for a steal.

A parking lot sign has a sticker on the back that says, “Thank you, I love you,” and I wonder how long it’s been since I heard a sentence anything like that.

A delivery takes me miles south of downtown, out in the suburbs that are springing up in the more rural countryside like mushrooms after a week of rain. It feels like converted farm country out here in a way I don’t quite know how to put my finger on. There’s a stillness in the air, a residual sense of the energy of the natural world, as though the software update converting the place from green pastures into urban sprawl hasn’t quite finished installing yet.

My low fuel light has been on for the past ten minutes, so I toggle my app to pause any additional orders after the next drop and start looking for a gas station. I just want to find one that doesn’t have a burly dude in a huge wig and fake nails who keeps calling me “love” in a falsetto so bad it sounds like a parody, which is what happened to me at a random Circle K over the weekend. I also want one where gas isn’t over $3.69 a gallon. I find one near a major intersection that meets both criteria, pull in, and offer my pinch of incense to the petroleum gods. In exchange I receive their favor: I can travel freely throughout the realm for three more days before having to make another oblation. Even with a small tank, every fill-up is 51 bucks, give or take a few pennies.

I fire Evie back up and head towards town.

The leaves are coming in fully on the trees now, and I wonder when, exactly, that all happened. They were little buds, and then all of a sudden, full-grown leaves. It seems like they just unfolded without me noticing while I was looking right at them. It’s a very pleasant evening, warm but not hot, breezy, with enough humidity in the air to make it feel soft as it brushes your skin. In a month or so, it’s going to be balmy, and being out in it will feel like being wrapped in a blanket taken from the dryer 30 minutes too soon.

A Jeep passes, going the opposite way, and I experience a brief but familiar involuntary spasm. There’s this thing called the “Jeep Wave,” and Jeep owners all flash that wave to other Jeep owners like a Masonic symbol or a gang sign. After years of driving Ruby around, every time I see a Jeep, I reflexively want to do the wave. But then I remember that I’m driving a generic Ford Fusion that lived a former life as a rental car, and throwing colors without context would be weird and confusing.

The evening settles into long shadows and the pastel colors of a horizon that has only just barely swallowed the sun. At this time of the evening, the high rises in the city are pale silver, wearing the pinks and purples splayed across the sky on their mirrored surfaces like Venetian masks. In an hour or two, they’ll shapeshift into glittering towers of ebony, decked tastefully in synthetic halos of colored light where they aren’t illuminated from within.

I try to work downtown almost exclusively now. There was a stabbing on the news a few days ago, but it’s not known for being a particularly dangerous place. Personally, I like the feeling of Raleigh. The buildings, the restaurants, even the bars decked out in garish neon. It’s a small city with a surprisingly big city vibe. There’s an energy down here that you don’t feel in all the sleepy suburbs.

My place is only a few miles from downtown and the vibe is totally different. Almost everything nearby closes by 9 or 10PM except the Wegman’s and the Denny’s. The Bahama Breeze at the end of my street shuttered its windows some time in the past month, but like the leaves on the trees, I didn’t see it until the process was complete. I just noticed one night that the usual small scattering of cars was no longer ringing the parking lot until midnight. It was open one day, and the next it was gone, the sign that was torn down over the main entrance leaving behind an outline of dark grit in the shape of the name. To be honest, I never went in there even once, but I thought about it pretty much every time I came home late. I just have this weird hang-up about going to bars or dinner restaurants alone. It usually leads to feeling even lonelier than just eating at my desk at home. There’s something about being surrounded by people but knowing not a single one of them is there with you that’s even worse than the silence of an empty room.

I’ve taken to telling myself I need to find a way to turn this damned isolation into a superpower.

That I need to be more like Elon, who also has a ton of kids he doesn’t live with, but still spends most of his time creating amazing things.

But I wonder how many times a day he sees their faces in his mind. I wonder if he ever cries at intersections, behind the tinted windows of his Cybertruck.

I wish I were passionate about robots and rocket ships in a way that wasn’t purely about wonder and aesthetics, because the whole future is going to be tied to those two things, and that man is leading the whole shabang. He got the money-making kind of autism. I got the kind that makes you obsess over the mouthfeel of words, and how they pull the strings inside of people, making them feel some kind of way. I like that gift, and it’s served me well, but now all the robots can produce fancy words at a fraction of the cost, and most people can’t tell the difference.

Maybe Elon is right. Maybe we’ll have unlimited abundance when all the robots, who’ll outnumber humans before long, start harvesting the very substrate of reality to make stuff so cheap they can practically give it to us for free. It’ll be like machine photosynthesis, that magical process whereby mechanical men alchemically transform the energy contained in starlight into a surreal sci-fi zoo for their human pets.

Maybe I won’t have to do stupid, pointless work, because like everyone else in the exhibit, I’ll be on the utopian payroll. And we’ll all just buy cheap stuff made by robots from the AI companies, which will be taxed by the government, which will use those taxes to give us free money, and that money will be used to buy cheap stuff made by robots from the AI companies, which will be taxed by the government, which will use those taxes to give us free money...

You know, like the water vapor cycle, only for 3D printed houses and cars you’re not allowed to drive yourself and your prescription for Soma, which is new and improved and now contains 30% more euphoric dissociation!

The alternative, if the smart guys in the room are right, is a bankrupt country in a depopulating world. A world where the richest nation on the planet can’t even service the interest on its own debt.

So the choice is simple, pleb: do you want a shiny, pristine machine utopia or a conventional apocalypse that looks like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel?

I think I know how to answer that question, and it’s a product of my long-held conviction that it would be nice for life not to suck. I’ll take the machine utopia. Sure, it’s going to be weird, and there will be unrest, and probably quite a few suicides, and countless people are going to struggle with the loss of any context that gives them a sense of what the hell they’re even for — but then again, I’m way ahead of them there.

But meaning doesn’t come from having a job. It comes from connecting to Reality itself. Unpacking it, marveling at it, understanding how it ticks, discussing it with each other. Making art and music and writing about it in a way only humans can, because only humans have human experience to draw from. Even in a frictionless world, there could be a kind of valuable challenge in that, and a worthwhile exchange to be had in sharing it with others.

So yeah, I think maybe Elon is right, and it’s better to be benignly fatalistic than accurately pessimistic, even if the universe is listening so it can stomp out your nascent hope before it takes root. Whatever this weird future is going to be like, it’s coming fast, and it’s unavoidable. I guess our best bet is to try to use it to our advantage. It’s a lesson you learn when bodysurfing in the ocean, like I did back in the 90s in LA, when I was still lean and fit for purpose, until my skin blistered under the relentless California sun. There’s just no point, a tiny human like you, trying to fight the waves. You’ve got to sync up with them, catch the lift as the water curls, let it carry you towards your shared destination: the shore. Sure, you might wind up a bit further down the beach than where you wanted to be, but you got there alive and not too beat up, and that’s not nothing.

Maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe I’ll hate it, this Robotopia. I’m just tired of feeling like I’m always punching surf. It would be cool to write and paint and sculpt and travel and podcast with my friends, figuring out mysteries like we’re all in the Bloodhound Gang together (even though Mister Bloodhound is never here), with all the time and freedom and none of the pressure of feeling like the rent depends on it. Maybe AI will leave some of the mysteries of the universe to us to solve, like brightly-colored plastic shape puzzles left for mentally-challenged children to bang about, if we could just stop putting the pieces in our mouths.

The darkness of night now sits heavy on many of the roads. Some are poorly lit, and some they never bothered to light at all. On a stretch down one country road, tall pines are framed in low-contrast silhouette against the midnight blue of the heavens, showing off a surfeit of stars.

My window is down, and the smoke of someone’s fire comes wafting in on the wind, smelling like incense from a church. It’s not religion, but it’ll have to be enough. At least for tonight.

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