I wanted J.A.R.V.I.S. long before there was anything …

I wanted J.A.R.V.I.S. long before there was anything resembling J.A.R.V.I.S.

I wanted what Tony Stark had: an intelligence he could converse with while going about the business of being alive. Something that could follow the movement of his thoughts without requiring him to stop what he was doing and operate a machine.

When ChatGPT arrived, I thought we were finally getting somewhere. I spent years looking forward to voice conversations with AI. But when they became possible, I continued typing.

I’m not even a particularly fast typist.

Typing is one of the ways I discover what I think. The words appear, and I follow them. Sometimes they lead somewhere unexpected. Sometimes I stop halfway through a sentence because the thought has wandered off without me.

But I think differently when I’m walking. I pace around the house. I wander along footpaths. I conduct conversations with myself, occasionally supplying both sides of the argument. Thoughts arrive without waiting to be properly dressed in sentences.

Today, I left my phone on the kitchen counter and wandered from room to room with earbuds in my ears.

The interface disappeared.

Somewhere, enormous computing systems were processing my speech and generating responses. But I wasn’t particularly conscious of any of that. I was simply wandering around the house, thinking aloud, and another intelligence was participating in the conversation.

What interests me is what happens when human and machine intelligence enter into sustained conversation. What new forms of thinking become possible when ideas no longer have to wait until I’m sitting in front of a keyboard?

Perhaps the walk generates the thought, the conversation gives it somewhere to go, and the writing desk becomes the place where I return to see what we’ve found. I don’t want to squeeze more productivity out of the day. I want to extend the territory in which thinking can happen.

The Textual Underground, my living archive of notes, writing, and conversations, has always been an experiment in thinking differently. Until now, much of that experiment has taken place through written conversation.

Today, for the first time, I began to wonder what happens when the conversation gets up from the desk and follows me out of the room.