Day 7: Harstad

Day 7 — Harstad

Today my attention was caught by a stooped old man, cane in hand, hearing aid in his ear, filming with a trembling hand some… seagulls… or whatever he found interesting there, with a tape camcorder and fold-out screen from back when he was young, while his old wife waited patiently for him to get it out of his system.

When they get home, they'll probably throw an evening where they invite the last two friends who haven't died yet to watch the travel footage together on a VHS player hooked up to a tube TV, with a doily and a porcelain figurine perched on top. I can't imagine what else you'd do with those ancient tapes, stamp-sized resolution and no stabilization whatsoever. His friends will feel like they were right there with him on the adventure: seasick from how much his hand shook while filming.

And as I watched them for a few seconds while walking past, all of this running through my head, still shaking mine slightly, dismayed at the pointlessness of his effort and the technological chasm between the two of us… I realized, of course, that I'm really not all that different.

Even though I have the latest phone and I'm connected to my audience nearly in real time around the clock, the artistic act, the motivation, the satisfaction, and the point of what we're both doing are the same. What I'm doing isn't one bit more brilliant than what he's doing. And poor Geesche… only she knows how many times she's waited on me, just like his old wife waits on him, while I photograph some apparently unremarkable scene from a dozen subtly different angles trying to extract whatever it was I found interesting in it. Or didn't.

At dinner we talked with our tablemates about how pointless it would be to legislate against — or even try to legislate against — the development of artificial intelligence, because there will always be someone working on it in secret, driven by nothing more than the suspicion that they're not the only one.

There's a song I like that puts it well: no matter how many times you point it out, some hate-filled fool shows up again the next day trying to prove himself, and people just carry on being suckers regardless, doing a great job of it.

And I've come to the conclusion that all we can do is enjoy life… for as long as we can.

Captives of the human condition we were born into, forever searching for an explanation our primitive brains can actually process, balancing precariously between technology's promise of heaven on earth and the threat of self-destruction with no appeal…

…whether we're filming with the latest stereo camera tech for ultra-realistic playback in VR headsets, or with a phone, or with a Super 8 camera from the '60s, or scratching a cave painting into a rock wall with a sharper stone — this is who we are.

And the ones who get to keep doing it with a cane in hand, a hearing aid in their ear, and a patient old wife by their side… they're just the lucky ones.