Two days ago, I was invited to come to an conference on the interference of the digital and sustainable world. With the quickest train I went there early and enjoyed the view outside. But suddenly, shortly before Augsburg – the train came to halt in emergency, and everyone heard a very loud noise. It sounded as if something – or someone had crashed with the train. Afraid, I looked around. People seemed to be a little worried. Suddenly, we began to speak to one another. “Do you know what happened?“, “No“, “And you?“ Everyone seemed surprisingly patient, and a little uneasy, too. This feeling when you know something tremendously bad could have happened. Was this another time, by chance, that I survived? And was this chance indeed – or the help of an intelligent system?

Indeed. A couple of minutes later the voice came through the train: “Please be patient. A tree has fallen onto the electricity system. An expert will be arriving shortly.“ Online, on our smartphones, we saw that the train had now two hours of delay. I left my seat to buy something in the train restaurant. Even though I don’t do it on every train ride, I love that this little space exists, a space between the out- and inside, a space where you can coexist without or with talking, where there are big windows, like in one of the older IC trains, where you feel in a different time. 

I was relieved. Because what I had thought, was that someone – an animal or a human being – I didn’t want to think further. Then I thought what I had heard about trees, and later in the conference they would talk about those AI systems – the web of trees – that could predict forest fires. And I thought about the weather prediction, when I looked out the window and realized, that I hadn’t sufficiently looked at it. Rain was pouring down like it had never happened, through the rain on the windowpanes the fields looked different, happy, in a way. I then thought that my newspaper hadn’t arrived. The storm looked impatient, and I read online the weather forecast. Storm, wind, lightnings.

Miraculously quick the train company resolved the problem; miraculously quick we passed the storm.

On the conference, we talked about the A.I. Dilemma and at first, I didn’t really understand what that means. I mean, you can read about things without ever really getting to understand them. We talked about Turing and parrots, and I remembered that I had attained some of the best informatic courses once and had been taught about the Turing machine. I had to take out the smartphone to read. Once, apparently, people had believed, that artificial intelligence like ChatGPT was just another work of art – even though no art works just that way – something to depict something else, a bare copy, a machine that repeats. And isn’t that true?

Indeed, while we use ChatGPT, we feed it, we train it, as an expert said on the conference, every time, you click on a series of crosswalks online to access a webpage, this is training for the machine.  

But if you think about the Turing machine, then you know, that this simple sort of concrete metaphor for a computer, reads and writes something else, it translates something into something else. Zeros and Ones. Strange, naked figures on the page, less interesting than the readable words, than meaning. At least to me. 

The strange thing with computation is its evidence effects. Because while you write code in the “back side of the screen“, on the front-end of the screen, it gets all colorful and magic. I have looked at a few younger humans dancing on those AI machines who proposes them a dance and they imitate it. They do seem to enjoy. Or those who play games with far-away game partners. Or those who enjoy chatting with each other. 

For me, as I am 38, this has turned over the years into something a little different. It would be difficult to me, to imagine writing this amount of kind of letters, going back and forth and by, and not having a face or a body in front of me. Maybe I am old-fashioned.

Outside, while I write this, a sparrow has come to sit on the basil, looks inside and leaves.

The writer Marguerite Yourcenar imagined long ago, in the 80ies, a silent world, one that is slow, one where everyone is always beautifully dressed. She imagines beautiful dresses accessible to everyone and she says that cars should not be used but in exception. You may find this way of life utopic. But sometimes it is hard to find a common ground on this. In Die Erinnerung an unbekannte Städte Simone Weinmann reflects on the possibility of going back to peasants’ life. Her genre is called dystopia. 

I had had enough water on the conference, though it was more than 30 degrees, I had parted with enough time and yet, in the end, I arrived exhausted in the train. I had some water with me, but I was still thirsty. I wrote and wrote and tried to put something together, but my head was exhausted after having worked so much time. I wished for some water to come by, but I needed to continue writing.

Strangely evident, the conference was wonderful, and the day was sunny, we had sunglasses and interesting talks in the shade, but when I took the train back home, the storm had come up again. When we arrived in Berlin, it would be so strong that lightnings made it dangerous to walk outside. 

I was sitting and writing and writing all seemed to nourish me. When one stop in front of the north of Berlin, the train finally came to pause, both, with who I was sitting in that coincidental sort of temporary community with, had left. A young woman, with a turtle dove sticker on her laptop and a man who still had kept himself an air of someone who worked in the woods, departed from the train. 

On the table, a half-filled water bottle. The man had seen me working without pause and left it there for me.

Thirsty, I left the train. Outside the lightnings, inside the subway station a homeless person, walking from one side to the other. 

The sticky fruit tree pollen can be washed away by the storm, but we? There was a haunted sort of feeling, intuition, not prediction though, of an Uncanny Valley. At home I started to read. And that feeling increased.

Vulnerability indeed.

I might read. And I might leave. But who will water my plants, when I’m not there?