Ed’s Note
Pinch yourself. That’s right — a short, sharp pinch that promptly raises a nice white welt and quickly fades to red. Feel all the neurons in your skin and maybe that layer of muscle and fat underneath fire up and send an angry little message to your brain. “This idiot just pinched us!!! For no reason — just like bloody that.” Isn’t it marvellous? You are still alive. In the here and now. Present. Accounted for. Feeling things.
I remember sitting in an airless room somewhere in the Wits University library skiving off lectures to watch films with two friends who were just as reckless with formal education as I was. We took to the cinema instead. There was a wonderful librarian with a small, comforting beard and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium. He dispensed recommendations like little gifts. One afternoon, during a marathon screening of all of Wim Wenders, I had what you could call an epiphany. This was what all that good money my parents were spending on my higher education was for.
The clarifying moment was brought on by Wings of Desire. The wings referred to the fluttery accoutrements of the angels of death, who would swoop down from wherever and cradle the dying in their final moment on this plane — the angel, who longed for the human experience of actual flesh-and-blood life, whispering sweetly consoling, achingly beautiful words to ease their passage.
The basic premise of the film was that when you are dead all the good shit is over. And by good shit Wim meant things like the sweet taste of sun-ripened tomatoes in deep summer, cheese on fresh bread, the opening chords of your favourite song striking at your heart strings, the gurgle of a baby, the particular slant of morning sunlight as it creeps over your windowsill. The sheer visceral life of it all. The five senses, in their simple irrefutable glory, firing up your neural pathways, telling you that yes, you really are alive. There is no greater meaning — this is it. Savour it.
Now that AI is seriously threatening the life of the mind and Mark Zuckerberg wants you to give up and go live in Meta, there is some urgency to the question of what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life. Probably because our degrees are about to be rendered meaningless if ChatGPT can perform quadratic equations faster than you can say “Clear the Amazon forest so I can ask my AI what to do about my recalcitrant lover.”
Become a plumber, is the advice of Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI. But perhaps a chef will do just as well. They too trade in real-life things. Chopping, dicing, slicing, firing things up. Their productions are fleeting and evanescent. All the world in a momentary flash of delight on the lips. Isn’t it wonderful?
X
Aspasia
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