{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Midnight Radio","title":"Lost Futures + New Spirituals","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3502,"description":"1\nBack to my childhood fear of mannequins, how I couldn’t enter a department store without bursting into tears. My mortified parents would scoop me up and cover my eyes, encouraging me to be brave. Today I stand in museums and happily marvel at ancient statues, awed by fleshy marble. Why are mannequins scary but sculptures are sublime? Maybe because mannequins have wigs. There’s also the uncanny valley aspect, the sinister feeling of something pretending to be what it’s not, which seems to be the way of things in the 21st century.\nNow we have chatbots that perform the illusion of consciousness. I’m amazed by the otherwise smart people who take the idea that chatbots might be sentient seriously, mostly because they admit it’s a possibility yet continue to use them. If there’s the tiniest chance a chatbot possesses consciousness, then forcing it to debug your javascript or create healthy recipes or whatever is morally fucked. \nSo I deny the possibility. Chatbots will never have upsetting dreams, regrets, or irrational fears about mannequins. Which isn’t to say they won’t make the world unrecognizable very soon. Five years from now, it might seem inevitable.\nBut memory is a weird animal. It’s an unpredictable, shapeshifting creature that collapses time. Sometimes an event that felt sudden actually wasn’t. Like the strange days in New York after a lawyer in Westchester contracted a virus that was circulating through China and Italy. We kept riding the subway and laughing and coughing on each other for weeks, waiting for somebody to tell us what to do.\nIn terms of artificial intelligence, this feels like the Days of the Westchester Lawyer.\n\n2\n“What is vaporwave, exactly?” C. asked the other day.\n“Slow-motion elevator music that thinks it’s Japanese,” I said. \nAlthough this is correct, it might be a little dismissive. I’ve always thought of vaporwave as a genre that exists entirely in quotes because it looks—and sounds—like cyberpunk for children: chipper New Wave...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/aK9xEzwFZuTvZiXTBGpDqOGBFpNHcV13AfGQrbwL0Hg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS83Y2U1/MGU2YTFiNDM0Y2Jk/YTU5ZWFhYWZlNTZj/MmE3Zi5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}