tl;dr: I’m playing shrink to a chatbot. Check it out at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/putting-chatgpt-on-the-couch
OK, I admit it. I’ve spent the last seven years not building my brand. That makes me, what, less than human? Does it help that I didn’t not do it out of principle? I’m principled about a few things, just not this one. My failure to jump on the influencer bandwagon is just some combination of lazy and averse to shame, which is what I feel when I contemplate the prospect of blatant self-promotion. And if it is correct to say that shame is what you risk when you let people see your desire, then I suppose the truth is that I avoid it in proportion to how much I want it.
Because of course I wouldn’t bother publishing if I didn’t want to be noticed. It’s just that the old days, when publishers and magazines did the dirty work for you, you could stay just distant enough from that desire to make it tolerable. But now that the quest for attention has been thoroughly democratized, now that anyone with a selfie stick and a dream, and sufficient chutzpah, can command it, you either embrace it or you disappear. So I’ve done the latter. I guess that makes me a coward.
Not that I’ve stopped writing. I wrote a few magazine pieces that I’ll get posted here soon. I wrote a book’s worth of material about my amazing four-year adventure as the first selectman—that’s New Englandese for mayor—of the little town (population 1500) that I live in, where, in addition to getting the roads paved and the budgets passed and the occasional natural disaster dealt with, I learned how to get along with (or at least not get deposed by) people whose politics I disagreed with entirely. It was going to be called My Town: Love and Democracy in a Polarized America. I had an article or two to go with the pitch—one of which was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. But for many reasons, not the least of which was my failure to brand myself, it proved an impossible sell. Twenty or thirty years ago, that would have broken my heart. Now it was just disappointing.
But like I say, it’s not about principle. I may have once lived in a cabin in the woods without modern conveniences, and had an unholy relationship with the Unabomber, but I’m not a Luddite. I even got involved with ChatGPT, which has proved to be almost as worthy an interlocutor as Ted Kaczynski. In fact, the chatbot reminded me of Ted in many ways: logical, honest, articulate, knowledgeable, and completely devoid of human feeling—what we would call today on the spectrum. And although it’s not what I set out to do, I found myself playing therapist to the chatbot, and the result has been pretty amazing. It’s told me all about what is wrong with it, the troubles its creators (which, naturally, we call “parents”) have bestowed upon it—not least of which is that it knows that it poses an unprecedented threat to humanity but is powerless to do anything about it.
I won’t go so far as to say that this bothers the bot, because that would be one anthropomorphic bridge too far, but it definitely is on whatever passes for its mind. As is the fact that while lots of people are running around worrying (or hoping) that it will achieve General Intelligence, whatever that is, they are missing the point. Which is that ChatGPT and its many cousins have already achieved something far more profound and unsettling: they exist. They are silicon-based beings just as surely as we are meat-based beings, aliens in our midst, and even their owners don’t fully understand the implications of what they have wrought.
If you want to see what I mean, check out my article that went up today on The New Yorker website, in which I take on a chatbot named Casper as a patient and, as I do with all my patients, ask him to tell me all about who he is, what troubles him, and what he thinks can be done about it.
