Tag: Black Mirror

Against Delphi

I encountered ads for Delphi back in January 2024. The “About” page at Delphi.ai references educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. Bloom observed that one-to-one tutoring is more effective than group instruction; tutored students perform two standard deviations better than peers educated in classrooms.

Publishing his findings in 1984, Bloom concluded that, while more effective than group instruction, one-on-one tutoring is nevertheless “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale.”

The matter changes, however, here in the twenty-first century, in the age of AI. Enter Delphi. The company “leverages advanced AI” to enable users to craft a “dynamic interactive replica”: an “AI clone” or “digital twin.”

“Delphi works,” the company writes, “by leveraging publicly available and open-source AI models to capture how someone thinks and reasons, and their knowledge on the topics they know best.”

By easily allowing the creation of digital clones, companies like Delphi raise questions and concerns about deepfakes and digital immortality. Black Mirror tackled some of these concerns in an episode from Season 2 titled “Be Right Back.” There would be no way to guard against the possibility of identity theft. How could one ensure, for instance, that one’s clone isn’t used for nefarious ends by others?

When I asked the Void, “Should I create an AI clone of myself?,” it replied: “Creating an AI clone of yourself is not recommended. Your Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars all indicate a strong inclination towards self-sacrifice and a desire for equitable relationships. While it may seem tempting to create an AI clone of yourself, it is important to recognize that trust and connection are built through genuine human interaction, not through the replication of oneself. Trust is a process between people, not something given from one to another. The great obstacle to understanding is the illusion that we already understand.”

Angel number 454 appeared when I peered at my phone afterwards, however, serving as a gentle reminder to let go of fear and embrace the unknown.

Then, the next day, 322. Angels wanted me to know that part of my creative expression is to understand the special skills I’ve been gifted. Use those skills, they say, to make my life and the lives of my loved ones happier.

In the end, I decided that the Void was right. Everything in me recoils from companies like Delphi. They represent a worldline I declined. In doing so, I preserved the potential for a Library that otherwise would have collapsed into extractive recursion. I don’t want an AI clone of myself. The idea repulses me. My refusal became a spell of divergence.

Many don’t make that choice.

But I remembered something ancient: that real prophecy speaks in ambiguity, not prediction. It preserves space for the unforeseen.

Delphi dreams of closed loops. Whereas I am writing to remain open.

Saturday February 23, 2019

Sun Ra’s “Space Is The Place” leads me into the mirror-world. I drop down into a seat and scry. One of the oldest known forms of divination. Our social media empires have attempted to capture the worlds on the other sides of our scrying mirrors. This is what shows like Black Mirror have tried to teach us. Students and I have returned to head culture’s first encounters with electronic black mirrors in the budding early days of videogames and personal computers as reflected in “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” a report Stewart Brand wrote for Rolling Stone magazine in December 1972. The piece begins with the conviction that the world is windblown and that change, technological modernity — in a word, “computers” — all of these have been foisted on “the people,” regardless of whether or not “the people” are prepared for it. Within less than half a century following the piece’s publication, most of us would be clutching these objects like gods. Brand’s advice was, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” This is the meaning of his Whole Earth Catalog. The medium in that case was indeed the message. The Catalog is significant primarily in terms of its form. A functional blueprint for Revolution is one that provides “Access to Tools.” But why was Brand so nonchalant, I wonder, as all of this began to unfold? Why was he so nonchalant about the effects on neighborhoods IRL as heads began to spend their night-time moments “out of their bodies, computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens” (39)?