Dreaming Machines
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What is the opening story about the 2001 Baltimore train fire and its effect on the internet?
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July eighteenth, two thousand one started off as a regular summer day in Baltimore, Maryland. Underneath the middle of that city there's a train tunnel. It's brick, almost two miles long, and has been there since the eighteen nineties. And just after three in the afternoon that day, a 60-car freight train was passing through the tunnel beneath Howard Street when something went wrong. To this day, no one is entirely sure what happened, but cars left the rails, a tank car ruptured, and in that closed brick tunnel beneath the city, a fire started that would burn for days. It reached fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to actually make the bricks soft. Smoke was rising through the manholes. A water main burst onto the street, starting a flood.
But the most curious bit of damage was that two thousand miles away in Los Angeles, the internet slowed to a crawl. Because bolted to the wall of that tunnel, beside the train tracks laid a century earlier, were fiber optic cables carrying huge amounts of the data that made up the American internet. Emails didn't send. Websites wouldn't load. Phone calls dropped all along the east coast. For a few days, one of the largest machines human beings have ever built was sick. Because deep beneath Baltimore, part of its body was on fire. You could even say that day the internet experienced its own kind of nightmare.
This is part two of our exploration into the physicality of the internet and artificial intelligence, both its own embodiment and its physical influence on our bodies. In part one, we spoke with immigration lawyer Petra Molnar, who detailed some physical AI dangers such as Robo Dogs, but also the cognitive harm AI might be doing to our bodies and systems like the legal system, which we rely upon. Computational journalist John West detailed the harms of a frictionless human body in an AI world, and in this episode, he'll return to further discuss the physicality of AI data centers. An investigative reporter from Sciedad Juarez will further explore complications between AI and human bodies and what that means for labor, both in the sense of a constituency in our society and as an individual act.
But first, I want to refresh an idea we've been discussing in the previous few episodes, AI and the unconscious. Dr. Jewel Gold wondered if AI can truly be conscious if it doesn't have an unconscious, if it doesn't dream or have nightmares. doctor Michael Ferguson suggests that spiritual life is central to consciousness and might be a prerequisite for true artificial general intelligence, which all the frontier models are currently chasing.
The unconscious drives much of what it is to be a person. Our desires, our fears, all of it exists in the unconscious, largely. And AI is not programmed to have an unconscious. Well, why would it? AI doesn't dream. And so much of what it is to be a person is to daydream, is to think illogically. So many discoveries have been come about by people just letting their minds wander and you know of course unfortunately a lot of pain people experience are uh are rooted in conflict that that's in uh the unconscious that's not in our awareness but that's also sort of what it means to to be human.
And so if we're going to talk about AGI, artificial general intelligence, it's going to have to have spiritual intelligence baked into it for me to be convinced that it is truly AGI.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the opening story about the 2001 Baltimore train fire and its effect on the internet?
0:00–9:38
2
How did the Howard Street tunnel fire cause a slowdown of the internet on the West Coast?
9:38–17:59
3
Why might an unconscious be necessary for true AI consciousness?
17:59–29:25
4
What does the Sandman's “eternal waking” metaphor reveal about human apocalyptic thinking?
29:25–36:55
5
How does evolutionary psychology explain our tendency toward apocalyptic thinking?
36:55–53:00
6
What physical impacts do proposed data centers have on border communities in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso?
53:00–1:00:19
7
Who was Jeremy Bentham’s auto‑icon and why is it considered the first 24/7 livestream?
1:00:19–1:01:15