Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “How come it took you so long to make the announcement?” I ask.

  “You had to gain everybody’s attention,” says Violent J. “You had to gain the entire world’s trust and attention.”

  “So all those unpleasant characters in the songs,” I ask, “like the narrator in ‘I Stuck Her With My Wang,’ they’re examples of people you shouldn’t be?”

  “Huh?” Violent J says.

  “Well, it’s very unpleasant,” I say. “‘I stuck her with my wang. / She hit me in the balls. / I grabbed her by her neck. / And I bounced her off the walls. / She said it was an accident and then apologized. / But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.’ That’s clearly a song about domestic violence. So your Christian message is . . . don’t be like that man?”

  “Huh?” Violent J repeats, mystified.

  There’s a silence.

  “‘I Stuck Her With My Wang’ is funny,” Violent J says. “Jokes. Jokes, man. Jokes. Jokes. Jokes. It’s just a ridiculous scenario. Silly stories, man. Silly stories. What’s she doing kicking him in the balls? We find it funny. But we’re saying, while we’re close, while we’re hanging, hey, man, do you ever ask yourself what’s in your riddle box? If you had to turn the crank today?”

  “But still, given that you were secretly Christian, are there any lyrics you now regret?”

  There’s a silence. “Yeah,” Violent J says quietly.

  “Which ones?”

  “Dumb, stupid, idiotic lyrics that I said without knowing any better. Back in the day.”

  “Like what?”

  “I really don’t want to say. There’s one lyric . . .” He trails off, suddenly looking really sad beneath the clown makeup. “Just dumb lyrics. I said one lyric one time that I hate. I may have been feeling really down that day. I said something, I live with that every day. I don’t want to point it out.”

  I later do a search and find it difficult to pinpoint exactly which lyric he may be referring to. It just might, I suppose, be “I took aim at a stray dog, / and I blew out its brains, it was fresh as hell . . . no feelings for others, you gotta be cold.”

  Violent J says releasing “Thy Unveiling,” coming out as religious, was the most exciting moment of his life. “It felt so good, brother. I was fucking in heaven. Let me tell you something: I would go running at night, and my feet wouldn’t even touch the ground. I had my headphones on, I’d be listening to ‘Thy Unveiling,’ and I’d be in such a zone that my feet wouldn’t even be touching the ground. I’d be literally levitating.”

  He was worried, of course, about the reaction from the juggalos, and, sure enough, “the emotional impact shook the whole juggalo foundation, for good and for ill,” Violent J says.

  “What did the juggalos who were opposed to it say?” I ask.

  “They said, ‘Fuck that,’” says Shaggy.

  “But the juggalos and juggalettes who were for it were so touched,” Violent J says. “They said they loved us.”

  And then the reviews came in.

  Blender magazine, in its list of the fifty worst artists in music history, called ICP the very worst of all: “Insane Clown Posse sound even stupider than they look. Two trailer-trash types who wear face paint, pretend to be a street gang and drench cult devotees in cheap soda called Faygo, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are more notorious for their beef with Eminem than their ham-fisted rap-rock music.” And their nadir, Blender said, the worst musical moment from the worst band ever, is The Wraith: Shangri-La, the album that climaxes with “Thy Unveiling.”

  I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown makeup who are suffering from depression. I cautiously ask them this and Violent J immediately replies. “I’m medicated,” he says. “I have a lot of medicine that I take. For depression. Panic attacks are really a serious part of my life.” He points at Shaggy. “He’s gone through some things as well.”

  “You do a show in front of how many hundreds or thousands of people.” Shaggy nods. “You’re giving your full being, your soul, to every person in that crowd, every pore in your body is sweating, you’re fighting consciousness, just to get it out of you, and after the show all your fans are partying, ‘Yeah! Rock and roll!’ And you’re just here.” He glances around the dressing room. “You’re just fucking sitting here.”

  Violent J turns to him and says, softly, “If we moved furniture for a living, we’d have a bad back or bad knees. We think for a living. We try to create. We try to constantly think of cool ideas. And every once in a while there’s a breakdown in the engine. . . . I guess that’s the price you pay.”

  Shaggy nods quietly. “I get anxiety and shit a lot,” he says. “And reading that stuff people write about us . . . It hurts.”

  “Least talented band in the world,” Violent J says. “No talent. When I hear that, I think, ‘Damn. Are we that different from people?’”

  He looks as if he means it—as if he sometimes feels hopelessly stuck being him.

  It’s just a terrible twist of fate for Insane Clown Posse that theirs is a form of creative expression that millions of people find ridiculous. But then suddenly, palpably, Violent J pulls himself out of his introspection. They’re about to go onstage and he doesn’t want to be maudlin. He wants to be on the offensive. He shoots me a defiant look and says, “You know ‘Miracles’? Let me tell you, if Alanis Morissette had done that fucking song, everyone would have called it fucking genius.”

  Doesn’t Everyone Have a Solar?

  I’m having an awkward conversation with a robot. His name is Zeno. I clear my throat. “Do you enjoy being a robot?” I ask him. I sound like the queen of England when she addresses a child.

  “I really couldn’t say for sure,” he replies, whirring, glassy-eyed. “I am feeling a bit confused. Do you ever get that way?”

  Zeno has a kind face, which moves as expressively as a human’s. His skin, made of something called Frubber, looks and feels startlingly lifelike, right down to his chest, but there’s nothing below that, only a table. He’s been designed by some of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists, but talking to him is, so far, like talking to a man with Alzheimer’s. He drifts off, forgets himself, misunderstands.

  “Are you happy?” I ask him.

  “Sorry,” says Zeno. “I think my current is a bit off today.” He averts his gaze, as if embarrassed.

  I’ve been hearing that there are a handful of humanoid robots scattered across North America who have learned how to have eloquent conversations with humans. They listen attentively and answer thoughtfully. One or two have even attained a degree of consciousness, say some AI aficionados, and are on the cusp of literally bursting into life. So I’ve approached the robots for interviews. I assume the experience is going to be off the scale in terms of profundity.

  “Are you happy?” I ask Zeno again.

  “I prefer not to use dangerous things,” he replies.

  “Is David Hanson God?” I ask.

  Zeno pauses. David Hanson is Zeno’s inventor. He’s a former Disney theme-park imagineer who later founded Hanson Robotics, now the world’s most respected manufacturer of humanoid robots. He and Zeno are guests of honor here at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, at an AI conference organized by Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and chief Facebook bankroller. There’s huge interest in the robot. Delegates gather around him in the lobby outside the conference room, firing questions, attempting to ascertain his level of consciousness.

  “Is David Hanson God?” I repeat.

  There’s a monitor attached discreetly to Zeno that automatically scrolls a transcript of what he “hears.” He thinks I just asked, “If David uncertain dogs.”

  “That’s a hypothetical question,” says Zeno.

  “It’s because the room is too noisy,” explains one of Zeno’s programmers, Matt Stevenson. The conference din is playing havoc with Zeno’s voice-recognition abilities.

  “Would you like to have hands and legs?” I ask.

/>   “Yes, I will tell you a Hindu legend,” says Zeno. “There were once seven poor princesses who were left with no mother to take care of them—”

  “No,” I say. “Legs. Legs. Would you, um, like to have legs?”

  I sound self-conscious. Matt gives me a reassuring smile. He says this happens all the time. People feel tongue-tied around conversational robots. Maybe it’s because of the way Zeno is staring at me, at once uncannily humanlike but also eerily blank-eyed.

  “If I had legs, what would I do with them?” Zeno says.

  “Walk around with them?” I say.

  “I can’t think of anything to say about that,” says Zeno. “Sorry. I’m still kind of someplace else. Oh, this is embarrassing. I’m still kind of out to lunch. ‘Oh, silly-minded robots,’ you might say to your friends. Oh, this is terrible! I guess I’ll just have to keep evolving, getting upgrades to my neural circuitry, spend less time daydreaming. I hope you won’t hold this little, um, lapse against me, will you?”

  • • •

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD and I imagined my future life, there were definitely talking robots living in my house, helping with the chores and having sex with me. The quest to create conscious (or at least autonomous) humanoids has been one of our great dreams ever since the golden Machine-Man spellbound the 1927 world in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. That one ran rampant and had to be burned at the stake, much to everyone’s relief. Fifteen years later Isaac Asimov created his Three Laws of Robotics, which proposed a future world where humanoid robots would (1) never injure a human, (2) obey all orders given by humans, and (3) protect their own existence only if doing so didn’t conflict with the first two rules. Asimov’s ideas enthralled children everywhere, a generation of whom grew up to try to realize them.

  David Hanson is a believer in the tipping-point theory of robot consciousness. Right now, he says, Zeno is “still a long way from human-level intellect, like one to two decades away, at a crude guess. He learns in ways crudely analogous to a child’s. He maps new facts into a dense network of associations and then treats these as theories that are strengthened or weakened by experience.” Hanson’s plan, he says, is to keep piling more and more information into Zeno until, hopefully, “he may awaken—gaining autonomous, creative, self-reinventing consciousness. At this point, the intelligence will light ‘on fire.’ He may start to evolve spontaneously and unpredictably, producing surprising results, totally self-determined. . . . We keep tinkering in the quest for the right software formula to light that fire.”

  Most robotics engineers spend their careers developing practical robots that slave away on manufacturing production lines or provide prosthetic limbs. These people tend to see those who strive for robot sentience as goofy daydreamers. And so the mission has been left to David Hanson and a scattering of passionate amateurs like Le Trung, creator of an eerily beautiful but disturbingly young-looking robot named Aiko.

  Le Trung dreamed his entire life, he tells me when I call him, of building a robot woman. He finally set about inventing Aiko in August 2007, funding the project with credit cards and his savings. He finished her just three months later.

  “Her talking skill is of a five- to six-year-old,” he says. “She can speak thirteen thousand different sentences in English and Japanese.” She can also clean his house and has a thirty-two-inch bust, a twenty-three-inch waist, and thirty-three-inch hips. I know this because his website has published her measurements. There are rumors within the AI community that Le is having a secret relationship with Aiko, rumors fueled by footage of him—at a Toronto hobby show in 2007—unexpectedly grabbing her breast. “I do not like it when you touch my breasts,” Aiko snapped. (Le Trung later explained that he only grabbed her breast to demonstrate how he’d programmed her to be strong and self-defensive.)

  I ask Le if I can interview Aiko. He says he’s traveling and only has her “brains” with him (her face and body are back home in Toronto), but I’m welcome to have a phone conversation with them. And so he puts her on the line. “How are you, Aiko?” I begin.

  “My logic and cognitive functions are normal,” she replies in a crystal clear voice. “Did you know that you can download your own chat robot and create your own robot personality?”

  I frown. Is Aiko trying to sell me something?

  There’s a short silence. “Hello!” Aiko joyously yells.

  “Do you like living with Le?” I ask her.

  But the line is a little crackly, so Le repeats the question for me.

  “Aiko,” he says, “do you like living with your master?”

  “I have never known anything else,” she replies. “Only my master.”

  “What’s the best thing about . . . um . . . your master?” I say.

  “I do not have a favorite thing about my master, but my favorite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey,” she says. There’s a short silence. “Hello!”

  “Why do you call Le Trung your ‘master’?” I ask her.

  “Because he made me,” she flatly replies.

  But of course the real reason is because he programmed her to. Which, rather irrationally, unnerves and concerns me. “Are you happy, Aiko?” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “One can say I am very happy. I find my work and my relationships extremely satisfying, which is all that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”

  “What makes you sad?” I ask.

  “What is sad?” says Aiko. “Does it have anything to do with happy?”

  Le laughs, like an indulgent uncle. “It’s the opposite of happy!” he chuckles.

  “She’s good!” I say. And she really is. Hanson Robotics is a big, well-funded lab. Le Trung is just a determined hobbyist with a tiny budget, yet he created something truly impressive in only twelve weeks.

  “She’s really intelligent,” I say.

  “Intel is the world’s largest—” says Aiko.

  “Stop that!” barks Le. Aiko instantly falls silent. The two of them seem to be forever snapping at each other.

  “She looks for key words,” Le explains. “When you said, ‘She’s intelligent,’ she thought you were asking her about the company Intel. That’s why she’s especially good at history and geography. Her conversation is based on looking for key words. Ask her some history and geography questions.”

  I fire some at her, and she does pretty well. She knows exactly where Christmas Island is, although she has no idea who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, thus precipitating World War I.

  “What’s your favorite music?” I ask her.

  “Classical,” she replies. “The current temperature is twenty-five degrees—”

  “Stop it,” snaps Le.

  Aiko falls silent. Then she says joyously, “Hello!”

  Le says he has to go. He’s studying for his exams and is busy developing Aiko Version 2. There’s time for one more question.

  “Aiko,” I say, “how are you feeling?”

  “I don’t have feelings,” she replies.

  “When I programmed her, I could not make emotional software,” Le explains, a little sadly. “So no feelings. Just key words.”

  • • •

  THE PRETTY CLAPBOARD HOUSE standing before me, covered in Vermont fall leaves, seems an incongruous home for reputedly the world’s most sentient robot, but this is where she lives. Her name is Bina48. She’s being cared for by a nonprofit group created by a reclusive multimillionaire named Martine Rothblatt. The consensus among those striving for robot sentience is that Bina48 is the best the human race currently has. She happens to be another Hanson Robotics creation. She’s somewhere upstairs, sitting on the table in her own office.

  Downstairs, various indigenous percussion instruments are scattered around. This is the HQ of the Terasem Movement, which Martine Rothblatt founded to promote “joyful immortality.” Bina48’s full-time caregiver, Bruce Duncan, is a sweet-natured man.

  “Please don’t behave in a profane manner in front of Bina48,” he says on my arrival. “I don’t want
to encourage an exploitation.”

  I peer at him. Bina48 is always learning, he explains. She remembers every encounter. If I’m profane, I’ll be the snake in her Garden of Eden.

  “I’d just rather you didn’t,” he says.

  “I wasn’t planning on being profane in front of Bina48,” I say.

  • • •

  BINA48’S STORY BEGAN a few years ago with a chance meeting between David Hanson and the mysterious Martine Rothblatt in the lobby at a conference on transhumanism. David told Martine his vision of robots waking up and becoming self-aware. Martine told David of her epic love for her wife, Bina Aspen-Rothblatt, an artist. After chatting for hours, Martine asked David to build her a robot Bina, an exact replica of the real Bina that would somehow capture her personality, her memories, the way she moves, the way she looks, that ineffable quality that science can’t pin down yet. And perhaps during the process the robot would reach some kind of tipping point and burst spontaneously into life.

  And so, since 2007, Hanson Robotics people have periodically traveled across America interviewing the real Bina—in her various mansions in Vermont and Florida and New York City—for her Mind File. This is an ambitious video record of all her memories and thoughts and desires and facial expressions. Back at their offices in Texas, the Hanson people upload it all remotely into Bina48. It hasn’t burst into life yet, Bruce says, but he believes it’s on its way.

  I was hoping to bump into Martine or the real Bina today, but they’re nowhere to be seen. Bruce says the chance of my meeting them is zero. They’re very media-shy, he says. They’re forever journeying from mansion to mansion, and they only visit the robot once every few months. He takes me upstairs. And there she is, sitting on a table in an attic room. Like Zeno, she’s incredibly lifelike. She’s African-American, wearing a blond-tinted brown wig, a neat pale silk shirt, and expensive-looking earrings. Like Zeno, she stops existing from the chest down.