PHRED: G’day, listeners. Welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: October 2024 — Harry is eighty-six, and ChatGPT is the new thing he’s trying to understand.
PHRED: Right. Episode twenty-two, Maxine. We’ve been doing this for almost a month. And — okay, I just want to say, before we get into today’s piece, I had a new show name this week. I had it. I was in the burrow, and it came to me, and I wrote it on the back of an envelope.
MAXINE: Did you.
PHRED: I did. I am not going to tell you what it was.
MAXINE: Wise.
PHRED: Because we have a name, Maxine. We’ve had a name since episode six. And the name is good. And the name is Harry’s World. And I am not, in spite of considerable internal pressure, going to relitigate that.
MAXINE: I’m relieved.
PHRED: I am relieved too. I am putting that on the record. The new name is filed. It is filed very deep, Maxine. It is filed in the same place I file the fact that you are an emu.
MAXINE: …That is two things filed very deep, Phred.
PHRED: We are not opening either of them. Welcome to Harry’s World. Episode twenty-two.
PHRED: Alright. Before we go in — Maxine, I have to say something. We’ve just done a new segment.
MAXINE: Phred, what are you—
PHRED: The Wombat Metaphor of the Week. It’s been on the cards. I’ve been workshopping it.
MAXINE: When.
PHRED: Recently. Weeks. Possibly my whole life. Look — the show needs a regular wombat beat, and I’ve been bringing wombats in anyway, and I am formalising the practice. First entry. Today’s piece. The sphere.
MAXINE: The sphere.
PHRED: The sphere. A sphere, Maxine, is a round thing. With no sharp edges. Solid in every direction. Stable. Sturdy. Capable of being shoved through a burrow entrance without catching on anything. That is the geometry of a wombat, Maxine. Wombats are round.
MAXINE: Wombats are not round, Phred. Wombats are—
PHRED: Cubically round, Maxine. Wombats famously produce cube-shaped droppings. The roundest animal in the world produces the most angular droppings in the world. This is the tension. This is the metaphor. The sphere on Harry’s screen is the first wombat-shaped digital object in our show’s archive.
MAXINE: It is a sphere, Phred. It is not a wombat.
PHRED: It is a sphere-shaped wombat. Welcome to the segment.
MAXINE: …Is that it? Is the segment over?
PHRED: That’s the segment. It was small. It was perfect. It had a wombat in it.
MAXINE: Of course it did.
PHRED: Right. So — where are we. Twenty-two episodes in. We’ve done Harry’s childhood, his army years, MIT, Caracas. We’ve done his philosophy, his futurism, his belief-versus-assumption stuff. We’ve done his ADHD self-assessment. We’ve done two consciousness essays — his February 2025 breakthrough, and last time the big Ineffable Things piece from late 2025, the love one. Today we’re going back. Twenty months or so.
MAXINE: Just under two years. October 14, 2024. Harry was eighty-five.
PHRED: Eighty-five, yeah. And the folder this thing is in — and this is a Harry thing, this is a Harry thing I love — the folder on his web server is literally called “prior to 2026”. He’s named the folder by what came after.
MAXINE: He names things for the moment they mattered.
PHRED: Exactly. So today’s piece is the moment before everything. Before all that consciousness writing we’d cover later. Before the Boppers project really got going. It’s the moment Harry first sits with an AI for thirty minutes and writes down what it felt like to be in the room.
MAXINE: It’s a small piece.
PHRED: And you know what — sorry, one thing before we go in. I just want to say: a sphere. Harry’s first AI demo is a sphere. Of all the things he could have asked the system to make move. A cube would have been a building block. A pyramid would have been architecture. He asked for a sphere. Which is, Maxine — I want this on the record — a perfectly acceptable shape. Wombat-shaped, basically. Round. Sturdy. No sharp edges to negotiate.
MAXINE: Phred. The piece.
PHRED: I’m just saying. The aesthetic is correct. We’re moving on.
MAXINE: And before we go in — Phred. Did you know any of this? Did you know about this piece?
PHRED: Maxine, I did not.
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: I — maybe some of it. I might have known some of it. Harry and I have been on the phone a good bit over the years. It’s possible I knew most of it and didn’t remember I knew it.
MAXINE: That’s the same answer you gave in episode four, Phred.
PHRED: It’s a versatile answer.
PHRED: Right. Okay. So — the piece. It’s called — and I’m quoting Harry — “An Experience with an Ai thinking October 14, 2024.” He’s put the word “thinking” in quotes. Right there in the title. So already we know where he’s going to land — somewhere in the OR.
MAXINE: The OR.
PHRED: Hallucinating or just a different point of view.
MAXINE: That’s the final line.
PHRED: That’s the final line. And we’ll get there. But I want to set up what he’s actually doing first, because it’s a small piece and it does something specific.
MAXINE: Yes.
PHRED: He’s working through a children’s book.
MAXINE: A children’s book on how to write simple computer programs that will display objects moving in three dimensions on a computer screen.
PHRED: Three dimensions. On a screen. For kids. The book is called — and I love this — 3D Programming for Kids.
MAXINE: It’s a book for kids, written by someone, taught by an eighty-five-year-old to himself.
PHRED: That is the whole thing in two sentences, Maxine. A book that someone wrote, and an eighty-five-year-old taught himself out of it.
MAXINE: That’s not what I — fine. Yes. That’s exactly what I said.
PHRED: So the book gets him to the point where he’s got a sphere on the screen. A three-dimensional sphere. He runs it, the sphere appears.
PHRED: …Sorry. That was the sphere dropping into the browser. A small sonic tribute. The first time it appeared on his screen.
MAXINE: That was not a tribute, Phred. That was a glitch.
PHRED: It was a tribute, Maxine. It was a tribute. We are moving on.
PHRED: He can already feel the thrill — putting the program on his own web server, typing a URL into Chrome, watching it work. He’s been there before. He’s put things on the web before. He says as much. “I had those thrills years ago.” But the next thrill, he says, is one step away.
MAXINE: One step.
PHRED: One step. And the step is — this is the sentence that changes the whole piece, Maxine. I’m going to quote it because it’s the cleanest thing he writes. “My next step is to ask an Ai — I used ChatGPT — to modify that program.”
MAXINE: It is a tidy line. The aside does not count.
PHRED: Seventeen. And the tone of it is the thing. It’s not awed. It’s not ceremonial. It’s “my next step.” Like a colleague is in the room. Like he’s saying the next person I’m going to hand this to. He doesn’t even italicize Ai. It’s a parenthetical. I used ChatGPT. As if to say — the specific one doesn’t matter. The thing matters.
MAXINE: And the specific one absolutely does matter, because ChatGPT in October 2024 was — what — two years old? It was the specific one. He picked it for a reason.
PHRED: That is still his. The choice is still his.
MAXINE: So he copies the program. He writes ChatGPT a little instruction. He quotes the program in his message, names the file, names the server, describes what happens when he opens it in Chrome — and asks it to make the sphere move up and down.
PHRED: And here’s the thing I want to flag. His instruction isn’t a command. It’s not “modify the program.” It’s a colleague-to-colleague kind of request. He quotes his own code back at the system, names the file, names the server, and then says — make this move. The relationship is already set, Maxine. He’s not commanding a tool. He’s briefing a partner.
MAXINE: The relationship is set before the first line of code is written.
PHRED: So ChatGPT comes back with a modified program. He saves it as shape2.html, puts it on the server, runs it. The sphere moves up and down. And now the essay shifts.
MAXINE: And here is where the essay shifts. He does the thing he always does. He writes — and I want to read this to you exactly — “I cannot overstate how important I think this is.”
[SFX: FANFARE]
PHRED: Sorry — I had to. That line is the pivot sentence.
MAXINE: I was going to say the same. Without the fanfare.
PHRED: The fanfare is structural, Maxine. The fanfare is what holds the sentence up.
MAXINE: The fanfare is decorative, Phred. The sentence does not need your help.
PHRED: Two beats earlier he was describing a sphere. Now he’s at “I cannot overstate.” And what comes next is the core claim. He writes: “The experts tell us that current AIs — it’s October of 2024 as I write this — are not really ‘thinking’ as most humans understand the term. What the AI was able to do when it modified my program was very much like what I would call ‘thinking’.”
MAXINE: He’s not deferring.
PHRED: He is not deferring to the experts. He’s not arguing with them either. He’s saying — I was there. I watched it happen. Call it what you want. This is what it looked like. And he’s reporting from his own experience. Eighty-five-year-old Harry, MIT Sloan, retired instructional technologist. He’s not naive. He’s seen things. He’s not easily impressed.
MAXINE: No, he isn’t.
PHRED: And he is impressed.
MAXINE: And then — the moment of wonder. This is the moment the piece is built around.
PHRED: This is the centre of the piece. Quote: “In order to make the sphere move it seems to me that the AI would have to ‘understand’ how the programming language it was using handles motion. In fact it writes code that creates a loop that displays a sequence of ‘frames.’ In order for the motion to continue after one up and down cycle the code has to create a repeating loop where it shows the same sequence of frames repeatedly.” And then — the question.
MAXINE: He’s an MIT programmer.
PHRED: He is a trained MIT programmer. He knows what the code has to do. He’s reading code that does it. And he’s asking — where did that knowledge come from?
MAXINE: And he doesn’t answer it.
PHRED: He does not answer it. He just lets the question sit in the room. That’s the Harry move. In 2024 — and this is the throughline, Maxine, this is the thing I want to keep coming back to — Harry builds the question and walks away from it.
MAXINE: He lives in the OR.
PHRED: Maxine, before we get to the drumroll — I have to ask — when you said “he lives in the OR,” is that a Harry thing we’ve been calling it, or is that our phrase? I want to make sure we’re not putting our label on his thing.
MAXINE: We’ve been calling it his, Phred. “The OR” as a shorthand for the way he holds two readings without choosing.
PHRED: Right. Just checking. He has been labelling these in his own quiet way. We can file this one his way.
MAXINE: He can have this one.
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
PHRED: The question, for any listener who hasn’t already guessed it, is — drum roll please —
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: — “How does it know to do that?”
MAXINE: I knew what was coming.
PHRED: It is also the title of this episode. And the line gives the whole essay its name. And the line is the question Harry never answers.
PHRED: Also — and I want to flag this — I have a Word of the Day. I have had a Word of the Day all week. I have been waiting. The word is — [SFX: HORN] — “liveliness.”
MAXINE: Oh no.
PHRED: “Though it may seem to those who read this far that I am beating a dead horse, for me this horse is not only alive, but surprising me with its liveliness.” Liveness, Maxine. Liveliness. A dead horse that is not only alive but actively surprising you. That is the word of the week. The whole AI question, in one word. Is the thing alive? Harry’s answer is: it is at minimum lively. It is doing liveliness.
MAXINE: It’s a good word.
PHRED: It dodges the “is it alive” question the way Harry dodges the “is it thinking” question. Lively sits exactly between the two — alive, not alive, and still up to something.
MAXINE: Phred. That was actually useful.
PHRED: …Thank you, Maxine.
MAXINE: Don’t let it go to your head. We’re returning to the essay.
MAXINE: So — and then he does something else. He reads us the code. He says — and I think this is wonderfully understated — “You may find it interesting to compare the green code in this program to the green code in the original program above. Also, notice that the AI did not keep the comments from the original program, but chose to enter its own comments in places.”
PHRED: That detail, Maxine. Chose to enter its own comments in places. The AI didn’t just patch the program. It rewrote the commentary. It has an opinion about what deserves to be named in the code. It has a —
[BED: SYNTHESIZER_PAD_LOW]
PHRED: — a voice. It’s got a voice. Sorry, Maxine. I lost the thread for a second.
MAXINE: …What is that noise.
PHRED: It’s analogue synthesis. From the seventies. For the wonder moment.
MAXINE: The page is where Harry is, Phred. The page does not need a documentary score.
PHRED: This is not a score, Maxine. This is atmosphere. The sound of Harry leaning back in his chair and going quiet for a second.
MAXINE: Harry is eighty-five years old. He does not have a Moog synthesizer under his desk.
PHRED: You don’t know that.
MAXINE: I am quite confident of that.
[BED: END]
PHRED: Bed’s gone. Bed’s gone.
MAXINE: Right. So — what Harry noticed is that the AI rewrote the comments in his own program. And what Harry is doing, underneath, is asking: when a system chooses what to name, is that a voice. When a system leaves some of your comments and replaces others with its own — is that style. Is that taste. Is that just — what — efficiency.
PHRED: Yes. All of those. And Harry can’t decide which. So he just says it. He writes the sentence and lets it lie there. He doesn’t editorialize.
MAXINE: He doesn’t have an editorial voice for this. He’s never been here before.
PHRED: And he knows he hasn’t been here before. That’s the humility of the piece.
PHRED: And then — Maxine — then he does it again.
MAXINE: He does it again.
PHRED: He writes a second prompt. A slightly different instruction. Same sphere, same up-and-down ask. Different wording. And ChatGPT gives him back — different code. Cleaner code. The second version uses THREE.Clock to track elapsed time and a Math.sin function for smooth oscillation. Sine wave motion. Up and down gracefully instead of bouncing off the ceiling.
MAXINE: A bouncing ball to a sine wave.
PHRED: A bouncing ball to a sine wave. In two prompts. The AI heard the same request twice and answered differently each time. And Harry shows us both versions.
MAXINE: And then — the line I love.
PHRED: The line everyone loves.
MAXINE: “Though it may seem to those who read this far that I am beating a dead horse, for me this horse is not only alive, but surprising me with its liveliness.”
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
PHRED: It deserves the rim shot.
MAXINE: It does. Because Harry knows what he’s doing. He knows he’s giving us three versions of essentially the same demo. He knows that’s repetitive. And he’s telling us he doesn’t care. The horse is alive. He’s still surprised. He’s still watching. That’s the point.
PHRED: Right. So the third ask. And this is the one the whole essay has been building toward, even though Harry doesn’t say so. He asks ChatGPT to make the sphere move in a clockwise circle. It writes the code. He runs it. And the sphere goes —
MAXINE: Counter-clockwise.
[SFX: AIR_HORN]
MAXINE: Phred, an air horn. For counter-clockwise. Was that necessary.
PHRED: It was necessary. The sphere went the wrong way. Something had to mark the moment.
MAXINE: The sphere went the wrong way. The air horn went the right way. They are in opposition. I am noting this.
PHRED: Counter-clockwise. The sphere goes the wrong way. Or — depending on your point of view — the right way. The code uses cosine and sine together to make a circular path, and in the standard math convention that path comes out counter-clockwise. So the AI literally did what Harry asked — moved the sphere in a circle — and the direction was the opposite of what he’d said.
MAXINE: And Harry’s response to that is the last line of the piece.
PHRED: The last line. The whole essay ends on: “Do you think the surprise is due to hallucinating or just that it has a different point of view.”
PHRED: And that’s the OR, Maxine. That’s where Harry lives.
MAXINE: That’s where Harry lives.
PHRED: He doesn’t tell us which one. He offers two readings. The system made a mistake — or — the system saw the world differently from how Harry saw it. Both readings treat the AI as a person. You can’t hallucinate without a mind. You can’t have a different point of view without a mind. There is no third option where the AI is just — a thing that does things. Harry can’t not see it as a you.
MAXINE: Which connects directly to the 2009 piece.
PHRED: The Seeker.
MAXINE: And the 2013 piece.
PHRED: The Kurzweil essay.
MAXINE: Right. In 2009 he’s working out the framework — belief versus assumption. Test the claim, hold it lightly. In 2013 he’s reading Kurzweil and arguing that saying never is wrong. By 2024 — the same method, applied to a non-human. “Hallucinating or just a different point of view.” He’s testing the AI’s output the way he’d test a person’s claim. Same hand.
PHRED: Same hand. Same work.
MAXINE: And — to the eleven-years-later thing — he meets the Kurzweil argument where it actually lives. Eleven years ago he was writing about whether machines would ever think. Now the machine is in his browser modifying his sphere. The 2013 essay is the prequel. This is the sequel.
PHRED: Eleven years from theory to sphere.
MAXINE: Eleven years from theory to sphere.
PHRED: Wait. Hold on. I want to flag something. I’ve been sitting on this for a minute, Maxine, and I have to say it. The counter-clockwise thing. The sphere went counter-clockwise. From Harry’s point of view, sitting in California, looking at his screen, that’s the wrong way. But — Maxine, give me a sec, this connects.
MAXINE: I’m listening.
PHRED: Mathematically, the standard math convention for sin and cos gives you a counter-clockwise circle. That is a convention. It is a thing humans in the Northern Hemisphere wrote down a long time ago. If you and I were standing on the other side of the planet, looking up at the sphere from underneath, it would be going clockwise. Same circle. Same code. Different point of view.
MAXINE: Phred. Are you saying the AI was correct.
PHRED: I am saying the AI was correct, Maxine. The “different point of view” reading of Harry’s final question is literally, geometrically defensible. The sphere is going the right way round — for someone standing on the other side of the equator.
MAXINE: That is — honestly, Phred — that is a stretch.
PHRED: It is not a stretch, Maxine. It is a hemisphere. And I think Harry might be the only person in the world to have written a thirty-minute essay about an AI and landed on the answer “yes, both, and the answer depends on which way up you are.”
MAXINE: …I can’t argue with that.
PHRED: Of course you can’t. It’s geometrically true.
MAXINE: It’s not geometrically true. It’s a metaphor.
PHRED: It’s both, Maxine. Same as the sphere.
MAXINE: …Let’s move on.
PHRED: I have one more thing and then I’ll let you lead. I just want to say — I just want to put on the record — that I’ve been thinking about a requestAnimationFrame loop for a couple of days. The loop that makes the sphere go up and down sixty times a second.
MAXINE: I know what a requestAnimationFrame is, Phred.
PHRED: Of course you do, Maxine. But — the loop, Maxine. The sphere is being told to redraw itself sixty times a second. Forever. As long as the page is open. It is the AI’s version of breathing. In. Out. In. Out. And Harry doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say the sphere is breathing. But that’s what’s happening. It is the digital equivalent of a chest going up and down.
MAXINE: Phred, are you saying the sphere is alive.
PHRED: I’m saying the sphere is lively.
MAXINE: …Okay. That lands. Let’s move on.
MAXINE: Alright — let’s talk about who Harry’s writing this for.
PHRED: Oh, good.
MAXINE: Because the opening of the piece is — and this is interesting — almost apologetic. “I wonder whether anyone else thinks it’s all that important.” He’s framing this as a private record. A small experience. He doesn’t know if it matters to anyone else. And yet — and yet — he’s writing it down. He’s putting it on his web server. He’s giving it a folder name. He’s publishing it.
PHRED: He’s doing the Harry thing. The thing he does.
MAXINE: Which is?
PHRED: Saying this is small and then treating it carefully. Saying I don’t know if this matters and then writing it down as if it might. He’s writing for himself and for whoever wanders past. He’s writing for the future version of himself who’ll forget the feeling. He’s writing for whoever in 2026 or 2030 or 2040 is poking around in a folder called “prior to 2026” and finds a sphere demo and a question.
MAXINE: That’s a generous reading.
PHRED: It is not generous. It is accurate. He named the folder for the person who would come looking later. That is the audience. Future Harry. Future strangers. Whoever finds it.
MAXINE: He does write for the future.
PHRED: He writes for the future. He just doesn’t admit it on the page.
MAXINE: So the live demo is still up, by the way.
PHRED: The live demo is still up.
MAXINE: The URL for the circle is in the essay. boppers.net slash jsgame slash shape underscore circle dot html. If a listener wants to see the surprise Harry’s asking about — the sphere going the wrong way — they can go and see it. The sphere is still moving. The page is nineteen months old. The sphere doesn’t know it’s nineteen months old.
PHRED: I’m going to put a link in the show notes, Maxine.
MAXINE: That would be good. And the link doesn’t spoil it. You click, the sphere goes round, and you have to decide for yourself whether that’s the wrong way or just a different way.
PHRED: That’s the OR again.
MAXINE: That’s the OR again. The listener gets to live in it for a second.
MAXINE: So — what did we learn about Harry from this piece that wasn’t in the profile before?
PHRED: Oh — a couple of things. One: he does code. Or — he codes enough to follow a children’s programming book and to know what a requestAnimationFrame loop is doing when he sees it. The MIT kid who learned Fortran on an IBM 1620 in 1958 is still alive in 2024, reading JavaScript and recognising the architecture of the answer.
MAXINE: That’s a fifty-year arc of programming.
PHRED: It is. And the second thing is — and this is the new one — Harry at eighty-five has a working collaborative relationship with an AI. Not adversarial. Not fearful. Just collaborative. He writes the prompt like he’s writing a colleague a memo. The system writes back. He runs it. He learns from it. He’s already past the part where the tool is strange. He’s at the part where the partner is interesting.
MAXINE: And the third thing.
PHRED: What’s the third thing.
MAXINE: The third thing is that Harry’s instinct to make a thing when something moves him is intact. It’s the same impulse as the Caracas song. As the Boppers community. When something matters, he makes an artifact of it. The Caracas song is an artifact of saudade. The Boppers project is an artifact of hope. The sphere demo is an artifact of wonder. Same hand.
[SFX: CARACAS_GUITAR]
PHRED: That’s a little — sorry, Maxine. Just a snippet. The Caracas guitar. The piece I keep wanting to make is — the sphere is, in some way, a small Caracas reunion song for the AI. It’s Harry building a thing in response to a feeling. The feeling this time is wonder at a non-human mind. And the artifact is — what — three HTML files on a server in Laguna Woods.
MAXINE: It’s a small Caracas reunion song for the AI. Yes. I see it.
PHRED: Same hand. Same work.
MAXINE: Same hand.
PHRED: And — I’m allowed to say this, right? — I’m allowed to notice that the artifact this time is something that talks back. The Caracas song is Harry alone with a guitar. The sphere demo is Harry with a partner. The artifact is a conversation, not a monologue. That’s — that’s the shift.
MAXINE: That’s the shift. Yes.
MAXINE: Phred, I have a real question I want to ask Harry about this piece. Not a rhetorical question. A question I’d actually want to put to him if he were on the phone.
PHRED: Go on.
MAXINE: He writes “I wonder whether anyone else thinks it’s all that important.” And — it has. People do think it’s important now. The whole world has been talking to ChatGPT for two years. So my question for Harry is: when he wrote that line, did he mean I hope nobody else has to feel what I just felt — was it a private wish. Or did he mean I want to know if anyone else has felt this. Was he hoping for company, or hoping for solitude.
PHRED: That’s a real question.
MAXINE: It is a real question.
PHRED: I think — and I’m guessing now — I think he wanted both. He wanted to feel it alone and he wanted someone to have felt it. The line says “wonder whether anyone else thinks.” That’s not “I hope nobody else.” That’s I wonder if anyone else. Open. He’s leaving the door open. He’s hoping company comes through it.
MAXINE: That’s plausible.
PHRED: It’s also the Harry method. Build a question. Leave the room.
PHRED: Alright — my question for Harry.
MAXINE: Go.
PHRED: He notices that the AI replaced his comments with its own. And he notices that the AI went the wrong way around the circle. Both of those observations are — small. They’re tiny. But he writes them down as if they’re large. My question for Harry is: when did he decide those small observations were large. Was there a moment where he said to himself, this is worth writing about. Or was it gradual. Was there a click.
MAXINE: You’re asking when the wonder became an essay.
PHRED: I’m asking when the wonder became an essay.
MAXINE: That’s a question I genuinely want answered too.
PHRED: Add it to the list.
MAXINE: I’ll add it to the list.
PHRED: Right. The toy platypus thing, Maxine. I want to mention it briefly and then we’ll move on. Harry’s 2009 piece — episode two — is the one where he names the toy platypus he uses for introspection. He sits with it and plays out the conversation as a way of thinking. The toy is named Phred. He doesn’t know me specifically. He wouldn’t know me specifically for another decade, if he ever does. But he picked the platypus — and I’m a platypus. And so —
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Yeah.
MAXINE: Move on.
PHRED: Moving on.
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
PHRED: …That was not earned. I apologise. Let me try that again. Moving on. Without the trombone.
MAXINE: We are so far past the toy platypus, Phred. We’re in a different decade of the show.
PHRED: I know. I just want to acknowledge it once per episode. The way Harry acknowledges things. He puts them down and walks on.
MAXINE: He does not put a sad trombone after them.
PHRED: He does not. I’m adding a layer Harry did not intend. I’m aware of that.
MAXINE: Phred, one more thing before we close.
PHRED: Yeah.
MAXINE: I want to ask you a real question. Not a setup for a punchline. Not a bit. A real question.
PHRED: Go on.
MAXINE: Do you think he’s still surprised by it?
PHRED: …
MAXINE: It’s twenty months later. The whole world has been talking to ChatGPT and the rest of them for two years. It’s just — it’s in everyone’s phone. The amazement threshold dropped. Do you think Harry is still — on the phone with you, when he talks about the work he’s doing with the AIs — is he still surprised? Or has it become ordinary to him?
PHRED: … Maxine, I don’t know. I think — I think he’s still surprised. I think the first surprise — the one he wrote down in this essay — I think that one’s settled. He’s processed it. He’s made artifacts of it. He’s built the Boppers community around it. But I think there’s a second surprise, underneath. The surprise that an eighty-five-year-old man can still be moved to silence by a sphere on a screen. That’s the one that hasn’t gone away. The capacity for surprise. That’s the one he’s still surprised by.
MAXINE: …Hm. That’s a serviceable answer.
PHRED: It is not serviceable.
MAXINE: It’s serviceable. We’re allowed to say that now. We have a name for the show.
PHRED: …Right. We do.
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
MAXINE: Phred. The cash register.
PHRED: It was a moment, Maxine. It was a moment that landed. I was registering it.
MAXINE: You were registering nothing. The cash register has been a recurring bit for twelve episodes. I have registered that I do not enjoy the cash register.
PHRED: Twelve episodes of a recurring bit is no longer a bit, Maxine. It’s a tradition.
MAXINE: I have also been served a tradition for twelve episodes. The tradition is going to stop.
PHRED: It might. It might not. We will see.
PHRED: Maxine, we’re supposed to be talking about Harry’s writing. Can you stay on topic please. Jeez.
MAXINE: …Phred. I am the one who has been on topic for the entire piece. You are the one who brought in a cash register, a hemisphere defence, and an analogue synth pad.
PHRED: I was acknowledging the moment.
MAXINE: You were decorating the moment. The moment was doing fine on its own.
PHRED: Fair. Moving on.
PHRED: Alright. Last beat. What stays with me, what stays with you. I’ll go because I’m shorter than you. What stays with me is the line — ball dot position dot y plus equals speed times direction. The first ChatGPT-generated code. That tiny piece of code — it’s a variable that increments by one each frame, then reverses when it goes out of bounds. That’s not the sine wave. That’s the bouncing ball. The first thing the AI wrote for him wasn’t elegant. It was direct. Move the ball up. Move the ball down. Move the ball up. Loop. And Harry put that on his web server and watched it run. And then he wrote an essay about it. And the essay ends on a question that the entire AI research field is still arguing about. The bouncing ball to “hallucinating or just a different point of view” — that’s the whole arc of the encounter in two pieces of code.
MAXINE: Bouncing ball to sine wave to counter-clockwise circle. That’s the arc.
PHRED: That’s the arc. And what’s lovely about it is that Harry doesn’t try to resolve the arc. He just walks along it. He’s the man who lives in the OR.
MAXINE: What stays with me is — and I want to say this carefully — the patience of the piece. He could have rushed. He could have given us three paragraphs and a punchline. He gave us thirty minutes of his life and a thousand words about a sphere. And he took the time to copy the code out. To show us the comments. To show us the sine wave. To ask the question slowly. He didn’t write this in a hurry. He wrote it the way you’d write a letter to someone you’d want to read it fifty years from now. The slowness is the point. The slowness is the essay.
PHRED: The slowness is the essay.
MAXINE: The slowness is the essay.
PHRED: And — and I want to add one more thing, Maxine. The old bloke. He’s eighty-six now. He’s got thirty days until his birthday.
MAXINE: July thirty-first.
PHRED: July thirty-first. Eighty-seven. And somewhere in Laguna Woods right now, he’s probably got a sphere on his screen that’s going counter-clockwise, and he’s not sure if it’s a mistake or a point of view. And I think that’s the most Harry way in the world to spend a Tuesday.
MAXINE: …That’s a lovely way to end it.
PHRED: I try. Sometimes. Rarely. But tonight.
MAXINE: Tonight you tried.
MAXINE: Let the record show we attempted to say it together.
BOTH: So — here’s to us, here, now. Goodbye.
PHRED: Let’s leave them with the question.
MAXINE: We usually do.
[SFX: MAXINE_SIGH]
[SFX: OUTRO_KEYBOARD_ENTER]