(2023-02-22) Lantz Well Here We Are

Frank Lantz: Well, Here We Are. I feel like I’ve been training my whole life for this moment. I grew up reading science fiction. First Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, then Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick. When I was 14 I read Godel, Escher, Bach, and something clicked. I knew there was something here, something that explained the connection between possible worlds and impossible images.

Everything since has been downstream from these encounters. I bought an Amiga 500 and taught it to make poems and paintings. I discovered Borges and Calvino and Oulipo. I moved to New York City to be a painter. I read Derrida and Baudrillard and Deleuze. I played The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Wipeout and DOOM and knew that videogames, not painting, was the stream I was destined to be swept up and down in - not drowning but waving.

And every so often I would get a glimpse of the future that I had fallen in love with, assembling itself around me.

Each of these glimpses was a jolt that de-stabilized the complacent perceptual habits that inevitably dull our senses - Look! LOOK! The world is new and weird and beautiful!

Six years ago I made a game about AI. Then I made another one. And over the past three years I’ve been enthusiastically wrestling with the powerful new machine learning techniques that are coming on line, gripped by a mad scheme to put my training to work, to meet the future head on and make something out of it.

But now that it’s here. (Is it here?) Now that it seems to be here. I have to tell you - I have no fucking clue what is going on. I am deeply, deeply confused.

the smartest people in the room can’t agree whether we’re all going to die, or we’re all going to get rich, or none of it matters. I’m uh… I’m having trouble keeping up.

I don’t know what’s going on, and I won’t pretend to, but I have some strong convictions:

This is important

We are ready. AI is dangerous. AI causes problems, and bigger problems are coming. But we are equipped to solve these problems

Art Matters

Art is not a precious treasure in need of protection. Art is a fearsome wellspring of human power from which we will draw the weapons we need to storm the gates of the reality studio and secure the future.

Modern art trains you to look at the present in a certain way. That it might be the future. A glimpse of a new and different way of being in the world. Shocking, disorienting, but bristling with the radical promise of new patterns, new ideas, and new kinds of beauty.

It feels to me like, by teaching our machines to dream, we have brought the boldest projects of the 20th century back to life, with all the danger and promise that implies

The projects of liberation and resistance. The project of constructing a shared future that replaces superstition, tradition, and authority with new ideas, useful theories and evolving knowledge. We are lucky to be alive at this particular moment and I want to make the most of it.