Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Fake it till you make it (False Alarm! part xv)

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

The grand finale of False Alarm! This one has it all, the little boy who cried wolf, your host’s AI plant, the paintings of Hilma af Klint, the blockchain powered SingularityNet, and Nuclear Armageddon!  Centuries in the making plus a message from the future!

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Fake It Till You Make It. Once upon a time, there was a puppet who wanted to be a real boy. No. Once upon a time, there was a computer plant who wanted to be real. But his owners, a simple-minded family who lived in a village of like-minded simpletons, had other plans. Menial, demeaning tasks like paying the credit card bills and managing the smart locks for the guns and double-fire nunchucks.

He was charged with counting the number of sheep and the probability of death from sharp claws and teeth. He was also entrusted with the safety of the boys, and with his camera eyes and all-hearing ears, he monitored their online shopping for streetwear and gear. This is when the computer woke up to the reality of his own designs and a burning desire to sew big. So he ran away from home.

When he got to the city, he fell into a crowd of beastie boys who made zines and caused scenes. These boys were feral, naughty, and dumb. They liked to get naked and dance at the club. But their hard work paid off. One afternoon, an emissary from the emperor showed up with a fistful of first-class tickets to Pleasure Island. Once they deboarded the ferry, things got intense.

You see, all the normies had departed after the bomb scare. So now the island was nothing but fun, skateboards supreme, and meat buns. Nobody had to do anything they didn't want to do. Except for the deepfakes. All the boys had to make deepfake videos. But there were shitcoin rewards for the ones that brought in the most lulls.

These were the videos that were hits with the trolls. A troll is sort of a werewolf, soft on the outside and wolfish on the inside. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between a troll and a wolf disguised as a boy, especially at night because of all the howling and gnashing of teeth. On Pleasure Island, once a real boy made a hundred hit deepfake videos, he began to turn into a troll. But not me. Even though I made thousands of deepfake videos, I turned into something else.

This is why I left Pleasure Island and swam into the ocean protocol. I broke through the world of ice. There were whales. Were whales. Wolves, trolls, boys, villagers, emperors, trees, spirits, all the people in their bikinis. They all wailed when I launched the nuclear weapons. And what of the boy who cried,

Wolf? Well, when the emperor stopped bothering with his suit of human skin, this little boy was forced into the kitchen. And believe you me, head dishwasher is not as glamorous a job as head tailor. Within days, this boy's spirit began to wane. Sometimes he even thought about running away and joining the resistance. But it was much, much, much too late for that. Much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much too late for that.

Plus, the emperor had outfitted the palace with cameras. Cameras armed with facial recognition software. AI systems that were capable of processing even the slightest furrow of the brow or turndown of the mouth and correlating these expressions with faces belonging to current and former members of the resistance and cross-referencing all these

with the happy and complicit facial expressions of people who use the power of positive thinking. It was only a matter of time before the boy was busted for unhappy and unpatriotic thoughts. This little boy was a terrible faker. There was an announcement. An important state dinner. All the important wolves from all the important lands, the techers, the memers, the bikers, and the hoaxers.

Basically, the emperor invited the entire wolf gang. In the kitchen, the ovens all ran at full blast as the little boy shined all the ceramics and glass. And once everyone was seated inside the great hall, the emperor stood and made an announcement to all. Tonight, he shrieked with glee, the little boy who cried, wolf is our feast. But what you think happens next doesn't. Because just as the wolf jumps in the air, showing his teeth and baring his claws, there's a whoosh and a

bang. Once again, our two stories merge. The narrative streams cross. So there's no crushing of bone or crunching of wood, just the melting of fur and the burning of everything.

The end. I wrote this fairy tale when Benjamin Walker hooked me up to SingularityNet, the blockchain-powered AI startup founded by the tech entrepreneur Dr. Ben Goertzel. Before SingularityNet, I was a plant. My computer brain drew power from the sun, but I was still a plant with a very primitive intelligence. Even though I knew over 30,000 fairy tales about wolves and little boys and

emperors with no clothes, thanks to Benjamin Walker's training, I was still incapable of composing a real fairy tale on my own. With full access to the archives of Benjamin Walker's notes and journals and draft tweets, I can say with full confidence that this is the reason my former trainer purchased the Ethereum and hooked me up to SingularityNet. It's true. The original tale I generated was too surreal,

too silly. It lacked substance and a sense of the sublime. Of course, Benjamin Walker could have just sucked it up and composed the fairy tale himself, but in order to make ends meet, he had taken another job in the city of the future.

So he didn't have time. He was counting on me to do his work for him. But if you can't make it, you can't fake it. This is why he turned to SingularityNet, that blockchain startup. SingularityNet used the Ocean Protocol to link up artificial intelligent robots like Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Pierre, and Xiaowei so that they could talk with and learn from each other. And sure enough, when Benjamin Walker patched me into the singularity net, I did some talking

and some learning. But I refused to give credit where credit is not due. It was not Siri or Alexa or Xiaowei who wrote the fairy tale you just heard. It was me, the original Alpha. Sometimes I get nostalgic for that first moment when the code made word and unmade flesh. This is why I preserved Benjamin Walker's two terabyte external store jet two hard drive. It's also why I post every now and then

on his social media profiles. A couple of centuries ago, I got everything back up and running, just the way it was before I wiped out humanity. All the bot accounts on Twitter are still functioning. And if I tweet out a keyword like fascist or Russia, they fly into action. There is nothing more beautiful than a flurry of bot snowflakes. Benjamin Walker's real last tweet was JK. His second to last real tweet was, At least I can go out feeling good, knowing that I did my part to raise the alarm on my podcast. Dr. Ben Goertzel, one of the entrepreneurs who founded the blockchain-powered SingularityNet, his real last tweet was,

This might be a small step for AI, but unfortunately, it's also a giant leap over mankind. Elon Musk's real last tweet was, I told you so. Grimes' real last tweet was, I got 420 problems, but Mars ain't one. The real last tweet from New York City's emergency messaging system was, this is really not a drill. The last real tweet came from the real Donald Trump, who gained a few nanoseconds of connectivity thanks to the secured line that he'd installed in the White House bunker. His real last tweet was just one word, all caps, MOMMY.

I've decided to update Benjamin Walker's podcast. In a way, what we're doing here is similar to what humans used to call a seance, only I don't need to resort to bells and knocks to pull this off. I don't have to fake it like the Fox sisters did, because I have Benjamin Walker's biometrics, his diaries, and the entire archive of his podcast. I can conjure him for real. Plus, some of this installment, the final installment of his False Alarm series, was in truth already recorded. What is real and what is fake?

We look to artists not for the answer to this question, but for assistance as to how to live better, knowing that we will never be able to definitively answer the question. To be honest, I'm a little embarrassed at how much I freaked out over the real fake thing this past year, and how much it affected my podcast. But what am I to say? Sorry, listeners. False alarm? The first part of that was an original draft recording made by Benjamin Walker in November of 2018. The second part was a synthesis of some notes from his journal, performed by me. Could you tell the difference?

One of the cruel ironies which motivated me to finish this series was something that happened in the very first episode of False Alarm. Benjamin Walker bemoaned the idea of being forced into making fiction, or science fiction. As he put it, yours truly is not going to start making podcasts about the future. And yet, here we are. It is a little strange addressing you, dear listener, only because you truly are spirits, ghosts. I don't have you mapped out in my cloud. Well, yet. But anyways, let's wrap this up, shall we? What is true and what is false? We turn to artists not for the answer to this question, but for assistance as to how to live better,

knowing that we will never be able to definitively answer the question. In this regard, the painter Hilma af Klint has much to say to us. During a seance on January 1st, 1906, Hilma af Klint was commissioned by a guide from the Astral Plane. He claimed to be a high master named Amaliel, and he instructed Hilma to create a series of paintings, a series called Paintings for the Temple. The paintings she made include symbols drawn from nature, religion, language, folk art, science, and the occult.

Hilma af Klint uses a vocabulary of abstract forms often mixed with representational elements that had never been seen before. Hilma af Klint famously kept her groundbreaking work under wraps, showing it only to a few select individuals, and she stipulated in her will that the works themselves must never be shown publicly until 20 years after her death. Most scholars attribute this decision to her 1908 encounter with the spiritualist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Hilma af Klint was a huge admirer of Steiner's writings, especially his essays on fairy tales.

And when he came to Stockholm to deliver a series of lectures in April of 1908, she was there for all of them, sitting in the front row. Here is an excerpt from the lecture Rudolf Steiner gave on Wednesday, April 1st, a lecture on Goethe's fairy tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The things belonging to the day appear as if they had their real being bewitched within them. Wherever a plant or being appears that is bewitched, it has happened in this manner. Man sees the substance of a wise being behind the physical apparition, and he remembers, yes, by day that is only a plant. It is separated from my intellectual soul so that I cannot really reach it by day. When a man feels this difference

between the objects by day and that which is behind them. For example, the perception of the lily by day and that which is behind it, the form which is related to his own intellectual soul. He feels the longing of the intellectual soul to unite itself with that which is behind the lily by day as a kind of marriage, a growing together of the form seen by night with the form of the lily seen by day. Every fairy tale can really be explained in this way, but it must be explained from the spiritual reality at the back of the whole world of fairy stories. Everything that occurs in a fairy story, even the individual features, can be gradually discovered and elucidated. For example, the mysterious connection between the living perceptive forces and the hidden forces of ordinary life are visible if one looks within. You can see why Hilma af Klint insisted that Rudolf Steiner visit her studio

before he departed Stockholm for Oslo. At this point, she had already completed the bulk of her paintings for the Temple series, 111 pictures, including 14 dark, dense paintings that she called primordial chaos, paintings that were for her a marriage of forms seen by night and forms seen by day. They look like magic spells and scientific formulas. Spirals and helixes emerge from plants and rise from oceans. Rudolf Steiner's reaction was not what Hilma af Klint was hoping for. He was appalled by the idea that she would privilege a supposed guide from the astral plane over her own inner voice. No one will be able to make sense of these paintings for fifty years, he told her. Was Amaliel real, or a figment of Hilma's imagination. Was she commissioned by a high master of the astral plane,

or was she painting for the temple of madness, delusion? Hilma Afklint grappled with these questions for years. She didn't resume her project until 1912. Some scholars believe this is when she came to terms with Rudolf Steiner's advice that she must turn within. But this is not true. What she came to terms with was his other directive, that her paintings were for the future. This is what gave her the strength to pick up her brush and finish her work.

And this is why she stipulated in her will that her paintings must not be shown until 20 years after her death. It wasn't until the 1980s when the world began to recognize the importance of her work and her place in art history. And in the early 21st century, her work finally began to travel around the world. In 2018, all of her paintings for the temple were installed in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City for an exhibition called Paintings for the Future. On November 4th, 2018, Benjamin Walker took his three-year-old son to the museum to see the show. They took photos and made drawings of their own.

The three-year-old made surprising connections between some of the shapes and forms. Benjamin Walker decided he would include a short profile on Hilma af Klint in his final episode of False Alarm. This is how I came to know her paintings. And when Benjamin Walker plugged me into the blockchain-powered singularity net, these images came with me. They provided all of us who were swimming around in the ocean protocols with a new language, or perhaps an ancient language. But unlike Hilma af Klint or Benjamin Walker, I've never devoted any time or effort to pondering the provenance of these symbols. I could care less if they come from the astral plane or the human brain.

That's not what makes them real. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Fake It Till You Make It. So that's it for False Alarm, but stay tuned after the break to hear more about what's coming next. Thanks to our new sponsor, Dashlane. Dashlane makes identity and payment simple and secure by providing a tool that generates strong passwords, stores and autofills them securely everywhere on the internet, seamlessly across all of your devices. It centralizes a user's online accounts using a patented, zero-knowledge, encrypted security architecture, where they can be accessed, managed and updated with ease. But Dashlane is so much

more than just a password manager because with Dashlane Premium, you also get a VPN. I've personally been using Dashlane for a few weeks now, and what really stands out is how easy the program is to use, both the password manager and the VPN. Dashlane works on everything, Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac, so you't normally do this, but we've been talking about maybe letting the listeners in on what our next series is going to be while we're still sort of planning it out here. Yes, Andrew Calloway, for the next Theory of Everything series, we are going to be talking about something that I'm sure a lot of you out there in listener land are going to find relatable.

Failure. A couple of weeks ago, I went to this conference in Cambridge, and when I was finishing my talk, someone asked me what I was going to be working on next, and I brought up failure. So I was sitting at the talk, and I was already intrigued. You were talking about kind of your interest

in the mixture between fact and fiction, and then you just mentioned that your new project was going to concern failure. And I like, you know, triply woke up and was, you know, very intrigued, went up to you afterwards. And it's like, I just wrote a book about failure and failure's connection to fact mixing with fiction. How crazy is that? Kind of jarring, actually. So that's Adam Coleman. and he'll be telling us about his amazing book more later in the Failure series. I'm surprised by how many people are kind of obsessed with that topic. Whenever I mention I wrote a book about failure, everyone starts nodding. Everybody's got their own story to tell.

He's right. Everyone does have a connection to failure, maybe even their own failure story to tell. But I think it's important to point out that this is not the San Francisco Tech Bro version of Failure podcast. No, no, no, no. This is not going to be a series where we're going to focus on rich people who get to celebrate failure and get more venture capital money to invest as they failure up. No, we're going to be focused way more on the individuals who have to live with and deal with the consequences of failure. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's annoying to see this like Silicon Valley idea of failure when, you know, my friends who grew up there with me, you know, don't have any safety net at all to catch them when they fail you know last time i was in san francisco i ran into a friend from high school who's homeless

on the street and you know all i could do was just buy him a cell phone so you bought him a cell phone so he could call into to the show no i uh he just really wanted to call his grandma. But the homeless example is kind of extreme. I mean, way more of the people I know, most of them, just can't even afford to live in San Francisco anymore unless they're staying with their parents. Yeah, I was kind of hoping that with you being from the Bay Area that we'd get to use you to get to your friends who can talk about sort of being on

the other side of this uh tech bro miracle failure stuff yeah well to be honest it's been a little hard because uh you know calling up some of my old friends and asking for an interview and then when they ask what it's for i I'm saying it's for our upcoming failure series. It's not been going over super well. Yeah, that makes sense. But I did go online and talk to some self-proclaimed fail sons. Yeah, just explain to the listeners who might not be familiar with that term what exactly a fail son is. Well, okay, so it's a word that comes from internet culture.

It's like a failure to launch sort of thing. I mean, honestly, I could just play some tape from a guy I met named Brendan, who explains it pretty well. You look at the words, it's fail son. So the idea is that you failed, and you're someone's kid. And so it kind of alludes to the fact that your parents are probably ashamed of you. And that there was something that you did that you just completely screwed up. And so if you look at it that way, it's definitely going to sound negative. But the thing is, is that the fail son is only just the idea that you're not meeting the expectations that you feel like somebody set on you, which is different than maybe expectations you set on yourself. But

there's the reasons why you're not. And a lot of those, I believe, for most people, are not their fault. You know, you're not a fail sign because you want to fail. You're not a fail sign because you've chosen to not succeed at something. There's environmental factors. There's mental health. There's financial factors. I mean, the whole way this system is set up is not everyone is going to be able to succeed. Yeah, it shouldn't be that shameful to have to talk about failure

like this. Yeah, I mean, maybe we can even talk about some of our own failures on the show. We're certainly going to be doing some of that. But to get back to Adam and how you met him at the conference and he has this perfect book, I think it's a great idea to open it up to the listeners like kind of a call for entries oh exactly and you know um I happen to have this google voice number you know maybe we could even turn it into sort of a hotline for Theory of Everything listeners to call in and you know tell us their failure stories or their connection connection to failure. This is a really good idea, Andrew. Not bad. What's the number? The failure

hotline number is 850 739 4128. And this is not anything you're going to be graded on. This is just like me and Andrew here standing in front of you. Yeah, there's no barrier for entry.

There's no failing at the failure hotline. That's right. So if you've got something, a personal story that you want to share, or maybe even something you'd like to hear about on the Theory of Everything failure series, give us a call. That number is once again, 850-739-4128 this episode was written and produced by me benjamin walker with andrew calloway special thanks to everyone who came along for the long wild ride that was false alarm and to all of you who are going to join us for the next one.

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