Once in a while, Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley. It happened on August 8, 2024, at the opening ceremony for a nuclear fusion energy startup. The events of that day were so astonishing I wish I could blurt them out to you in an instant, like a hologram, but you will need to be patient, as the linear nature of language allows me to unveil only one piece at a time.
I had been sensing a malaise for a year or two, a feeling that tech had lost its flavor. The big AI leap was part of it. It wasn’t just the question of, “If AI could do everything, what would people be for?” (Deceptive question, since AI is made of people. Your data, remember?) More than that, the focus on AI seemed to change the way people thought about reality. A lot of my friends were talking about using language models to calculate the best future. Life was now a problem to be solved.
The way out of this trap, I think, is for people to become smaller. To get back in touch with the edge of mystery. This isn’t a conclusion I can argue for using language, but once in a while, if we’re lucky, it’s a thing that can be experienced.
So: An audience composed of venture capitalists, US military and intelligence agency officials, physicists, and San Francisco artists have been invited to a secret event. They enter through an imposing vault door to take their places in rows of seats that feel tiny in the shadows of a vast space. Behind them is a sea of refrigerator-sized capacitors. In front is a stage set that is a little hard to visually interpret. It is white and heavenly, high tech, large, glowing.
A woman of preternatural beauty is wearing a gown that looks like a lesson in higher-dimensional mathematics. Out of her back rises a cluster of white cables arcing far up to the roof. They are transmitting signals from her body’s changing electrical properties to (in theory) control a different, distant fusion reactor experiment. She does not sit passively; she is playing a piano with what seems to be impossible levels of skill. Not just skill but peculiar charisma. We are told she is also one of the most significant hackers in the world, creator of core free-internet tools like Snowflake in the Tor browser. What?
The event is directed from afar by a supermodel who is touring with St. Vincent. Wait, whaaaat!
Robots are playing instruments onstage as well, moving to the music like dancers. Two play a cello with a luscious vibrato, and another applies an arm to the piano. It isn’t like the stiff playing you usually hear from robots. Strange morphing images are projected on everything. You can’t always tell where one object stops and another starts.
Oh, and I’m there too, playing the usual sorts of unusual instruments I play, in a white robe with a necklace made of turquoise fangs from Morocco, and a brain-sensing cap on my head. It was an underground event, but Katie Drummond, WIRED’s global editorial director, scolds me for not having alerted a reporter to be present. Thus I find myself in the role of gonzo journalist. I will do my best to convey this exotic cultural moment.
This event had no right to be good. It should have been some weird mishmash. But grace and luck came together in a freak wave, and people were moved. Jane Rosenthal, who runs the Tribeca Film Festival, was there, and she cried. Grimes was there, gaggle of kids orbiting her on the floor, transfixed. One said this must be what monsters listen to.
How did we get here? No one remembers it the same. Here’s what I remember. I got a text from Charlotte Kemp Muhl, the supermodel. Her résumé goes like this: lots of mags and billboards. I remember staying in a hotel room in New York City and there she was, 12 stories high, on the building across the street. (Was it for Maybelline?) That’s the least of it. She’s also a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. With her longtime partner, Sean Ono Lennon, she has performed in bands like the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. At the moment, she’s the bass player for St. Vincent. Those two get pretty freaky onstage. And she’s a wild video director, for musicians like Adán Jodorowsky. She’s more cyberpunk than any other human on the planet. She speaks in a rapid spray of surreal metaphors.
How do I know Charlotte? It seems like everyone in Hollywood and Silicon Valley knows her. In my case, through Sean. Yoko brought him to get a VR demo at my startup back in the 1980s when he was just a boy. He wore a rainbow-frilled coat, like Jacob, and Yoko made alien vocalizations from inside VR. How did I know Yoko? Gosh, in the late ’70s, when I was in my teens, I ran around in her crowd in New York, staging late-night music raids with John Cage and the like.
OK, so Charlotte texts me a picture of Serene (who uses no last name) rendered in an insane dress with cables coming out of her body, informing me that I’ll be playing in a show and that this is part of the design.
Serene is hard to describe. She’s a world-class concert pianist. I recently saw her play spur-of-the-moment on the lobby piano at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, and afterward she couldn’t leave because everyone just needed to talk to her. Who are you? What just happened? She’s the Higgs boson of pianos, inspiring gravitational interactions.
Then there’s the skill. I am a pianist too, and Serene is just annoying this way. She can sight-read crazy hard music and learned the terror pieces casually and quickly. The Rachmaninoff concerto that inspired the movie Shine, about a pianist who goes insane trying to play it? Serene inhaled it. She’s a Bösendorfer artist, so an ambassador for the most expensive and elite pianos.
She’s also, as hard as this is to take in, a computer scientist. Hired by Google as a teenager, first engineer at Google Ideas. Now has a soft-launched startup called Snowstorm that supercharges Snowflake’s capabilities. She obsesses over the user interface, torturing herself over nuances of font and color. Watching her code is like watching her play a fancy concerto. She’s so fast it looks like sped-up video.
Earlier in 2024, I was at the Tribeca Film Festival to do a panel with Natasha Lyonne, and Darren Aronofsky says, You gotta come to my partner Alice Lloyd George’s startup showcase. Alice has a venture fund, and the various startups were presenting in booths in a gallery space. There were weirdly organic video projections on the wall by the artist Koto Murai, who might be best known for collaborating with Grimes. Koto also works with Serene, whom he invited. I had invited Charlotte, and there we three met. Even though that moment doesn’t seem like it could have happened, it was captured in a photo by the artist Dustin Yellin.
Charlotte and Serene were destined to collaborate. It was instant glue. There’s a lot of glamour when those two are together. I sometimes have to close my eyes to remain able to think.
It transpires that Charlotte and her collaborators had been developing robots for music, a collab they call Finis Musicae. Sage Morei does much of the design. Much of the hardware was built by Nader Shokair. Fredrik Gran is the robot motion artist and also invented wonderfully pliant robot hands that are good for cello bows and fingerboards.
Still with me? Now it turns out that Serene had met JC Btaiche at one of those Silicon Valley ritual dinners to bring founders together. JC is the precocious CEO—only 19 years old at founding—of the fusion startup Fuse. You’ll recall that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated the world’s first net energy gain from a fusion reaction in December 2022. More energy came out than went in. In theory, this could mean virtually endless energy without a carbon footprint, so this might be how we survive. Here’s the problem: If you consider the whole building of huge lasers and other equipment needed to get this result, there’s no longer a net gain. Only when the surrounding tech becomes more efficient can we benefit from Lawrence Livermore’s advance.
So the race is on to engineer an efficient surrounding for fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to get a bunch of big capacitors to discharge at once, thus kick-starting a reaction. That’s why, at our show, there were all those big caps behind the audience. (You also see constructions of big caps at other fusion startups, like Helion.) The goal of Fuse, as JC describes it, is to become the SpaceX of fusion, to enable “big tech” achievements with all kinds of partners.
Back to our story. JC contacts Serene and says we’re opening a second facility (the first was in Canada) and it would be nice to have a spectacular opening ceremony. Serene, being a startup founder who’s also, naturally, working on music robots, applies obsessive logistic efforts. Charlotte, being a director, does the same. Those of you with any life experience might be asking yourselves, “This sounds like an alien planet with two queens. Was it, um, a process?” I will not answer you directly except to compliment you on your finely hewn wisdom.
Now you know the basics. I am a scientist and do not enjoy superstitious takes on reality, but so many coincidences had to happen at just the right time for this show to come together in just a few weeks. At the last minute, we needed high-performance robots; a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg, found them for us. Why does reality synchronize like this sometimes?
I used to put on high-effort, high-tech music shows, often in VR, in the 1980s and ’90s. I burned out. It was bruisingly expensive, stressful, and exhausting. I used to long for the future when VR would get cheap and lots of people would know how to work with it. But when that time arrived, instead of relief, I had the feeling that VR had become too easy. There used to be a higher-stakes feeling. You had to make every triangle in the scene count, since there could not be too many, even though the computer doing the real-time graphics cost a million dollars. There’s a tangible sense of care in those earliest works.
If I longed for hassle and expense as guarantors of stakes, then I found them again in this show. The week leading up to the performance reminded me of those early days of VR. Late, late nights, which don’t come as easily to me as before, in rehearsal; Serene would be up there trapped in the cables and the mathematical dress, designed by Threeasfour, but there’s a timing problem with the robot motion. With assistance she frees herself, gets to a screen, and does 10 minutes of high-speed programming. The robots glide again.
The program was mostly Serene playing classical pieces. There was a moving three-hands (two from Serene, one from a robot) piano arrangement of “Dido’s Lament,” the closing aria of a Henry Purcell opera, composed in the 1680s. It’s a kick-ass song, told from the perspective of a woman who has just set herself on fire to protest her lover sailing away. I used to think of it as a male ego trip; the women care only about us and will die without us. In this case the meaning shifted. In the original sung version, Dido sings, “Remember me, remember me. But ah, forget my fate.” It sounds like Humanity screaming, as portrayed by some who think AI is a new big alien who will take over. But Dido really didn’t need to kill herself. She was better off on her own. And humanity need not scream. AI is made of us. We can make it safe so long as we remember.
I played in a couple of duets with Serene, a György Ligeti and an improvisation. I brought three instruments: a contrabass flute, because its big metal bends looked similar to the joints in the robot arms; a glissotar, a new kind of 3D-printed slide saxophone from Hungary; and a Terra, a weird synth from Soma, one of my favorite new instrument companies, that looks like a slice of a log with golden bumps. At times it felt like I was channeling Sun Ra.
Of course I can’t prove to you that this show was as good as I think it was, but you can look at videos and get a sense of it. See what you think.
When tech makes life infinitely convenient, we get meaninglessly busy. I fully expect people to spend all their time in the future entering long strings of letters and numbers to verify themselves, because we’ll have used AI to, I don’t know, bioengineer flying beetles that confuse Sam Altman’s metal eyeball biometric gadgets. But at our show—in which there was simply too much pressure on us to be in charge of ourselves—we felt meaningfully busy. And that’s when a different kind of future peeks out from the haze. It isn’t dark and dystopian. It isn’t phony. It is ethereal. It emits aesthetic signals we feel but do not recognize or understand. It’s one way for people to get smaller.
I was asked to say some words in the course of the evening, since I am known as a talker around the Valley. Just a few sentences were enough for this military-heavy audience. Thank you so much for bringing art into a facility motivated by national security, I said. In addition to defending life, we must make life worth defending.
Source : Wired
