Some Dreamers of the Silicon Dream

In 1966, Joan Didion wrote about a woman who burned her husband to death in a car on a lonely road in San Bernardino. She called the essay "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." But her piece is less about the murder and more about the Californian faith that life, if pursued with enough intensity, could be remade.

Having just moved to San Francisco, I can tell you this: Didion's California still exists. The dreamers now live further north, in a city of glass and fog; and they're still trying to build a better life out of bright air and circuitry. I am one of them.

The mornings here are metallic, and the afternoons are golden. San Francisco is a city of reinvention, though what people reinvent now are their routines (workflows, interfaces, pipelines, marriages…the list goes on).

If the old California dream was about transcendence through motion, the new one is about transcendence through efficiency. People here move fast. They are building things—companies, networks, even families (though sometimes you get the sense the families are just another form of networking). People are busy making money and time. But mostly, they are busy finding short cuts. The pressure to do things quickly has seeped into the lingo: "Ship fast," they say. "Iterate." "Scale."

Every billboard in the city takes advantage of this pressure, promising some version of the same thing: Build anything. Learn faster. Live smarter. Didion wrote that the people of San Bernardino "believed in the dream. It was a dangerous faith." You can feel that same danger lurking here, under the high ceilings and behind the glare of screens, where everyone (including me) types as though redemption could be engineered.

The other morning I got lost on a run. I was tired, out of water, and somewhere in Twin Peaks. I called a Waymo instead; it was cheaper than Uber, and I told myself that mattered. The Waymo asked what temperature I preferred and whether I wanted music and then drove me home in perfect silence. No insupportable rap music. No weed smell. No phone conversations in a language I don't understand. No fear that one wrong turn could mean the end of my life.

It took a few blocks to realize that what I had really wanted was not efficiency or safety but avoidance: I didn't want to face the embarrassment of being too tired to run back. That was my short cut (in this case, a psychological one). We do this all the time, selecting the path that keeps us from looking foolish or from feeling something too human. AI is the same. Used honestly, it can teach us; but used dishonestly, it replaces not just our words, but our thinking, our imagination, and our capacity to form a voice that sounds like our own (and even more important, our trust in that voice).

Didion's Lucille Miller set fire to her husband's car and then told herself she had tried to save him. We all do some version of that now, though our fires are digital. We burn money, voice, and thought, telling ourselves we're saving something else (time?). Didion wrote that "the future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past." Silicon Valley perfected that forgetting, calling it innovation.

Artificial intelligence has become the new religion of California. People here speak of it with reverence, as if it were both oracle and cure. In Didion's California, people dreamed of moral renewal; in ours, they dream of cognitive renewal. But the fantasy is the same: freedom from the drag of being human. I can't say I don't share that fantasy. We all do, in some form. And fantasies are fine, even necessary, until we forget that they are fantasies—then they become dangerous.

Schools and universities are now scrambling to regulate AI in the classroom, drafting policies and penalties as if the soul could be managed by committee. The students will ignore them, of course. The better question is not whether students will cheat, but whether we can save them from cheating themselves. The fantasy of outsourcing the soul is an attractive one for everyone, though the appeal is especially strong for young people who are still developing a sense of self. What schools and universities should be discussing is how to make students aware of the consequences of outsourcing their souls.

By late afternoon, the fog creeps back over Twin Peaks, and the light turns gold again, almost on fire. For a moment, the city looks precarious, like a sleepwalker about to jump off a cliff. Then tiny white diodes appear in the dark, and the dream restarts. This is not the California of Didion's time, but the mood is the same. The dry, shimmering despair, and the sense that something precious is being used up in the cold glare of ambition.

The problem is not the technology. The problem is the fantasy that perfection can be built, that the soul can be debugged, and that if we just work fast enough, automate enough, think efficiently enough, we might escape ourselves. In the end, every generation of Californians believes in its own miracle. The gold. The light. The code. And now, the faith that perfection can be built, that salvation can be optimized, and that the soul itself can be made scalable.

The centre wasn't holding in Didion's time, and it's not holding any better now. Unfortunately, here it is more the case than ever that

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

—W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"