The Man Who Built the Machine Is Taking a Year Off and Nobody Thinks That's Strange

First of all, Semafor. What kind of a name is that for a place you get your news. Sounds like a semaphore, sounds like a flag you wave from a ship, and I don't trust a website named after a signaling device from a war I wasn't alive for, waving something at me, and me not knowing what it means. Fine. Fine. I'll read it anyway because apparently that's the job now, reading things off boats.

So Demis Hassabis — and let me just say, in 1982 a man's name was Gary or it was Ron or, if his people came over on a boat, it might've been something with more vowels, but you learned to say it, you didn't shrink from it, Gary next door had a name like a foghorn and we all managed — Demis Hassabis is the man in charge of DeepMind, which as I understand it is the outfit that teaches the computer to think, and now he's stepping back from his day-to-day for a year. A year! To "focus on other priorities." That is the sentence. That is the whole sentence, sitting right there in black and white like it's nothing, like a man just decides to hand the steering wheel of the thinking-machine factory to somebody else for twelve months and go do — what, exactly? Watch birds? Learn the cello? Nobody says. Nobody has to say. That's the thing about people who've already won, they don't have to explain themselves to you or me or the fella at the DMV, and I've got a real problem with that, I've had it since 1982, though I couldn't tell you what happened in 1982 to give me the problem, only that it's from then.

Now here's what nobody's asking, and I'm going to ask it because apparently that's my job now that everyone else has decided to just print the press release and call it a news article: who's minding the store? You build a thinking machine — and I want to be clear, I don't fully understand what a thinking machine is for, whether it does taxes or whether it just sits there and hums like the icebox my aunt had that you had to hit with the flat of your hand on the left side, not the right, the right did nothing, my uncle swore by the right side and he was wrong his whole life about that icebox — you build a thinking machine and then the man who built it just steps back? For a year? What if it gets ideas? What if it decides, in that year, while the man's off doing his "other priorities," to reorganize itself the way my cousin Skip reorganized his garage that one summer and none of us could find a single tool in there for four years, the sockets were in a coffee can, the wrenches were hung by size but the sizes were wrong, he'd eyeballed it, and to this day I believe there is a 9/16 wrench living behind the water heater in that garage that no living person will ever recover.

And another thing — nobody in this Semafor article, or wherever it landed after Semafor, semaphored it, whatever the verb is — nobody asks what "other priorities" even means. In 1982 if you told your boss you were stepping back to focus on "other priorities" you got walked to your car by a security fella named Lou who had a mustache like a push broom and didn't say one word the entire walk, not one, just the jingle of his keys, and that was the whole conversation, that jingle said everything Lou needed to say, which was "don't come back Tuesday." Nobody gets the Lou treatment anymore. That's what's missing from this. Everybody just gets to "transition" now, like it's a highway on-ramp, real smooth, real gradual, no Lou, no jingling keys, no shame. I don't know when shame left the building but I'd bet you a dollar to a donut it happened sometime after 1982 and it happened quiet, the way a pilot light goes out — you don't notice till you're standing there with a cold stove and a match that won't take.

I want to tell you about the arcade on Fenner Street, because it's relevant, and I'm not going to explain why it's relevant, I'm just going to tell it, because a man is allowed to tell a story. This was a place called — I believe it was called Tilt, or possibly Tilt-A-World, there was definitely "Tilt" in it, on account of the machines, you understand, and it was run by a fella everybody called Duck, not because he looked like a duck, though he sort of did, but because his last name was something like Duquette and it got shortened by people too lazy to finish a French name, which was most of us. Duck ran that arcade with an iron fist and a roll of quarters he kept in a tube sock behind the counter, and if your Asteroids machine ate your quarter — and they did, regular, it was a way of life — Duck would come around, not smiling, never smiling, and bang the side of the cabinet with the flat of his hand, same exact motion as my aunt's icebox now that I think of it, funny how that works, and the quarter would drop and your game would start and Duck would walk away without a word, like Lou, like the security fella, there's a whole generation of men who communicated entirely through banging things and walking away and I miss them, I miss them specifically, I don't miss the summer Duck got the flu and his nephew ran the place for six weeks and doubled the price of Ms. Pac-Man tokens without telling anybody, that nephew's name was — I want to say Perry, or it might've been the other one, the cousin, they had similar hair — and that whole arrangement fell apart around Labor Day when Duck came back and found out and I don't know what happened to Perry, or the cousin, one of them just wasn't around anymore, and nobody asked, that's the point I'm making, nobody in 1982 asked "where'd Perry go," you just noticed the stool was empty and you moved on with your life, which is a skill this Hassabis fella's employees are about to need in spades, because I guarantee you right now, somewhere in that building, someone's already measuring the drapes for his office.

Which brings me — and I haven't forgotten the thinking machine, I want to be very clear I have not forgotten the thinking machine, it's right here, front of mind — brings me to the actual question, which is what does a machine that thinks do with itself while the man who built it is off "focusing on other priorities." Does it know? Does somebody tell it? Is there a memo? "Dear Machine, Demis is taking some personal time, please continue to think, regards, Legal." I don't know how these things are organized and frankly the article doesn't say and frankly I don't believe the article's authors know either, I think they got a press release, same as I would've gotten a flyer stapled to a phone pole in 1982 advertising a Tupperware party, and they printed it, flyer and all, and called it exclusive reporting, and put "Exclusive" right there in front of it like that word still means something after they've done this to it.

I had a phone once — this is unrelated, I want to say that up front, this has nothing to do with anything — that weighed as much as a bowling shoe, the receiver alone, and you could've stunned a intruder with it, and we were a two-phone household which was considered showing off, and the second phone was on a cord so short you had to stand in the hallway closet to use it in private, which is where I learned, at age eleven, entirely by accident, that Mrs. Halloran two doors down was not actually related to the man she called her "brother," and I have never told anyone that until right now, in this column, about a thinking machine, on a website named after a nautical flag signal, and I don't know why it's coming out now except that maybe some things just sit in a man for forty-some years waiting for the right non-sequitur to ride in on, and Demis Hassabis stepping back for a year, apparently, was that ride.

Here's my actual position, and I do have one: I don't think the man's coming back. Nobody comes back from a year. A year is a euphemism, same as "process to play out" is a euphemism, same as "other priorities" is a euphemism, everybody's speaking in euphemism now because plain talk got outlawed sometime after 1982 and nobody held a vote on it, it just happened, quiet, like the pilot light. In 1982, if you were leaving, you left, Lou walked you out, the drapes got measured immediately, no year-long "transition," and everybody had the decency to be a little bit ashamed about it, and I'll tell you, I'd take that world back tomorrow, arcade tokens and all, Duck's flat-handed slap on the cabinet and all, Perry or the cousin, whichever one it was, vanishing without a trace and all, over this — whatever this is, wherever it's going, whatever the thinking machine does with its year off from being watched, which nobody, and I mean nobody, in this whole exclusive semaphore of an article, has bothered to ask about, and I am not letting that go, I am not, I'm just not, I'm going to go find that 9/16 wrench behind the water heater and I am not letting this go.

— Edgar