Chapter 14 — Emergent Phenomena
Rufus describes his greatest hope for AI.
Followed by Chapter 14 —— Emergent Phenomena, in which Saskia returns to the present, and a disconcerting surprise.
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Hello Friends,
The title of today’s chapter refers to one of the miracles that sometimes surfaces when a collection of simple agents or elements are amassed together. It’s the sweeping arc of a murmuration of starlings, flying in their mesmerizing swoops, without ever consulting a master team plan. Only, in the case that Saskia witnesses, it’s a consequence of time travel that emerges without being something that is a priori built into the act of slipping in time. Emergent Phenomena are both tantalizing and mysterious, and I’m delighted whenever I encounter them out in the wild.
One such encounter, in my own life, happened the other day when I was listening to an episode on the podcast The Joy of Why. Specifically, that episode was a meditation on the nature of consciousness. Towards the end of the show, I was fascinated to hear the guest state that possibly the best paradigm for thinking about our consciousness is as an emergent phenomena: there is no me, just the appearance of such that emerges from the firing of the billions of neurons inside my head. Definitely thought provoking.
Anyway, given the excitement that you can no doubt hear in my voice for this concept, I want to give a little shout out to possibly my favorite emergent phenomena connected to AI. It might not be as glamorous or alluring as the prospect of soon being able to ask OpenAI to put together a movie tailored to your own idiosyncratic preferences. And, maybe because of that, it doesn’t get quite the same press coverage, but I’m convinced it’s going to revolutionize the world in far more profound ways.
Let me, however, first give a little context for what I’m so excited about.
The other day I was chatting with a buddy of mine about his kid. His child——now a young adult, really——lived high school the way many do: in the moment, without a lot of thought for what lay ahead. Unfortunately, that meant his grades were not what they might have been, and he didn’t get into the university he wanted to. In consequence, he’s spending this year at a community college while his closest friends jump right into their college lives. Notwithstanding all of that, I’m happy to report that he’s had an amazing about-face and that things are turning out really well. In short, he’s flourishing.
Naturally, my buddy was curious if there was a specific happenstance that his kid saw as the key ingredient underpinning his change. Was it simply that his son noticed the sword of Damocles hanging over his head as he lived his profligate lifestyle? The prospect of his friends moving on without him? “Actually,” his son related, “it’s got more to do with ChatGPT.”
It turned out that this young man has been using the AI model as a tutor. Whenever he had a question, he simply asked. 3AM? Not a problem, his digital companion was always there and eager to help and happy to indulge any follow-up questions.
Now, I hear some of you screaming: “but what about hallucinations?” And to you, I’d say: “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and his grades have him on track to join his buddies next year.
So, the emergent phenomena I’m most excited about in the context of AI is: tutors for everyone!
The significance of this prospect is probably a little hard for most people here to fathom. My guess is that if you’re reading this, you’ve very likely been one of the lucky minority in this world who have been blessed with amazing teachers. Pause for a moment and appreciate that. You have been incredibly lucky!
My own friends are largely befuddled when they first consider this——evidence of just how hard it is to see outside our own context, and the idea that our experience is unusual.
In any case, here’s to the wisdom and insight offered by the LLMs. Perhaps it’s not so different from my own me that emerged from the neurons in my head!
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. Just to reiterate an earlier promise I made, our first brush with the nuts and bolts of AI is just around the corner, chapter 18 to be precise. So hang in there if that’s what brought you here in the first place :)
PPS. 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
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter fourteen in which Saskia returns to the present, and a disconcerting surprise.
— 14 —
Emergent Phenomena
Saskia left her garden shed and walked up the path to her backdoor. She’d left it unlocked the last time she visited for a meal on her way back to the present, but at this point it was hard to recall if she’d inadvertently locked it at some earlier moment she’d lived. She reached for the handle, and happily it turned. Heading into the kitchen, she heard the little bell on Tomato’s collar and smiled to see her cat slinking into the room. He hopped up onto the counter and purred.
Saskia gave him a pet, but stopped at a sound from the living room.
Her eyes swung from the tabby on the end-grain wooden butcher-block counter to the doorway framing . . . another copy of herself.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, almost involuntarily.
“Where else should I go?”
“Back to your own time.” It was a strange declaration given she had only just returned from another time herself, but Saskia was sure this was her time. She looked to Tomato, hoping for confirmation. But the cat merely glanced between the Saskias and, unfazed, turned his attention to the sachet of unopened wet food leaning against the tiles at the back of the counter. Evidently, any mystery underpinning the appearance of a second Saskia was less noteworthy than the contents of the colorful packaging he recognized.
The two women laid out their competing claims on the circumstance they found themselves in, but they were at an impasse. To the surprise of both women, neither recalled having lived what they witnessed the other living now, which seemed to imply that they were fundamentally different people. And yet, the Saskia who had emerged from the living room was, apparently, the same Saskia——as near as either of them could tell——who had turned the garden-shed Saskia back from her mission to check on Mica in the restroom, back by the etched nickel puckered lips at Cleo’s.
“That was two nights ago,” she said. “And——”
“Two nights ago?” Saskia interjected.
“Sure, two nights ago,” her doppelganger confirmed.
Saskia’s mind spun. She had worried that she had mis-counted on her return trip, but——
“Where were you last night, anyway?”
“I——was out yesterday,” Saskia white lied.
Living room Saskia was surprisingly appeased by this, what with her mind lost in her own tale. “Anyway, after Mica left the restroom, I went back inside. But there was no one else there.”
“Who were you expecting to find?” Saskia asked automatically.
“Another one of us. Maybe two more.”
It was bad enough that a double her was standing in front of her, but the thought that there might be more Saskia’s roaming about was . . . “How many of us have you seen?”
“I’m not sure. You’re the first one I’ve spoken with. Since Cleo’s, that is. The other us’s that I’ve seen——I thought they were you too. You just came home after paying the bill at the restaurant, yes?”
Garden shed Saskia nodded.
Living room Saskia explained that after she had watched Saskia leave the restaurant, she tried slipping backwards and forwards in time to find her own place, but each time she returned she’d seen another Saskia again: “On the way home. And then here, inside the house, though I only saw you——at least I assume it was you——through the kitchen window. The restroom us’s were gone, but you were still here.”
“The restroom us’s?”
“After Mica left me——to go back to the table, to you——I went back into the restroom. But when I went back in, it was just me there.” Living room Saskia described various failed attempts that she’d made at convincing Mica that time travel was possible. Attempts that had involved showing up in duplicate in the bathroom.
Garden shed Saskia was speechless. Sure, she recalled meeting the woman in front of her outside the restroom at Cleo’s, but that oddity had faded during her trip back to the where it all began, and she recalled none of the incidents inside the restroom that the Saskia double who stood in front of her was describing.
“After seeing you in the kitchen,” living room Saskia continued, “I went for a walk.” She described how, unable to escape the Saskia that stood across from her, she’d spent the night wandering the streets trying to make sense of it all. Then, when she’d returned late that morning, she’d discovered she had the house all to herself. “Call it optimism, but I figured the universe had somehow reset itself. My key still opened the front door.” The last thought was given as an oddly confirmatory piece of evidence that this was indeed her house. “This feels a lot like my time to me. Are you sure I’m not the native one here? You weren’t here yesterday and I . . . ” She trailed off.
Garden shed Saskia covered her closed eyes with the middle two fingers of each hand and rubbed her temples with her index fingers.
Neither Saskia could make sense of the evidence they had witnessed. Neither understood, yet, that one of them had inadvertently slipped into the other’s timeline. How could they? And that in this timeline there was no hope of finding the other world that included the restroom interactions with Mica.
“I am a bit comforted that you don’t recall anything that happened in the restroom. It means my interference worked . . . somehow.” Living room Saskia bit at her thumbnail. “But it also freaks me out. What if there’s no way to get back to the world in which that happened?”
“I feel like I’m analyzing data from a new ML architecture. I——we——can run trials; go back and forth through time, and then we see the upshot. But just because we can run the program doesn’t mean we have any idea how it’s doing what it’s doing.”
“Time travel is as mysterious as our best models of the human mind,” the Saskia standing in the doorway to the living room agreed, immediately understanding her double’s analogy; it was a truism of machine learning that mysteries abounded when examining the output of chains of neural nets. Saskia’s favorite visualization of the phenomena was to imagine the anthill that emerged when a colony of the simple insects pulled together, notwithstanding no formal plans having ever existed.
Both Saskia’s were standing there, grappling with how it was that they could exist simultaneously, when garden shed Saskia asked: “Do you think Mica recalls what happened in the restroom at Cleo’s?”
“I don’t know. After I sent you back to the table, I was about to slip back into the shadows of the alcove outside the restrooms when she came out. So I told her I needed to use the bathroom myself. I wanted to go back in to look for the other us’s anyway.”
“So we can’t be sure, either way——without asking her——if Mica did or didn’t see all of us.”
“Maybe one of us should ask her,” the older Saskia submitted——though ‘older’ was a debatable moniker, given that the ‘younger’ Saskia had just spent ten days going back to the beginning and returning.
Again there was a silence while they both considered the possibilities. Finally, Saskia, who was now emptying the sachet of food into Tomato’s bowl offered: “You know yesterday, I wasn’t here. Not just not home.”
But before her doppleganger could ask about Saskia’s declaration there was a loud knock at the front door.
