What We Make

on machine living

The Terminator franchise (which to me is just the 1984 original and 1991’s T2: Judgement Day) counts in the pantheon of Los Angeles Movies. Maybe not near the top of everyone’s list of the hundreds of films set in this city, but because LA was my home when I saw them -- original on old HBO in somebody’s den, T2 at the Pasadena Pacific Hastings theater -- and because big scenes happen at iconic locations like the Griffith Observatory, the concrete LA River bed, a mall in Reseda… they take me home.

I was truly obsessed with Judgement Day, and especially with the transformation of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor. My one bad addiction is thanks to Hamilton and her coveted look in this film: chain-smoking Camels from one side of her lip, leaping and swerving, racking a mammoth shotgun with one perfectly sculpted arm. The strongest female body I had seen filling the screen, taut with not an inch to spare, even for a pore of emotion. No Botticelli ideal of comforting curves, just a body made to get the job done, to save the world by force and will, to leave the soft possibilities behind. The original enemy was a metal machine in a skin suit, so to fight it she made herself into a machine -- through endless padded cell chin-ups and smashing objects in the interrogation room, refusing to acknowledge any story but the one she knew to be true (including that her work to save the world was more salient than her motherhood).

There are many treasured lines in this movie, but at the core is Sarah’s mantra: no fate but what we make. She believes the world is nothing more than what we build and destroy and try again.

I don’t love most machines, as a relative concept, and I sure didn’t make my body into one. I spend a lot of time wondering why humans have fated themselves into a continuous ladder of machinery, the newest one always making the next one necessary, and whether there will be anything human left when the rungs run out.

My spring break was spent in Downtown LA with the Association for Writers & Writing Programs. Alongside learnings from the conference, I made the rough discovery that Los Angeles is taking their cue (of course, as always) from the movies, giving the newest machines a training ground for as many tasks as possible.

On the first night I was smoking in the fashion district’s yellow street lights after dinner; it was Tuesday around 10pm, and the street was sleepy as a downtown core could be – a few others exiting restaurants and a dog-walker on the last trip out. Suddenly a motorized cart rolled around the corner ahead of me. All by itself, a thing shaped like a large camping cooler on wheels, with eyes (?) like a Despicable Me Minion, bumping gently into invisible barriers and correcting course, whirring. A robot.

An autonomous food-delivering robot. I had never seen one and was not prepared; and worse, deep down I knew it belonged there more than I did. Stupefied, I watched it roll on.

I couldn’t wait for this year’s AWP because I couldn’t wait to show home to my friends not from there. One night downtown made me see this was stupid, though – I hardly knew the place better than they did. I did not grow up in the center of LA, but in a lush tony suburb, just visiting downtown sometimes for an old-school lunch with grandpa, a Dodger game, an Olvera Street field trip. I was now sort of Schwarzenegger, dropped from the sky into Griffith Park, some vague programming to guide my navigation and acclimate to the marine-hazy air, but no sense of my roots tingling in the ground.

The next morning, I was studying a pair of the delivery bots on the same corner when a car pulled up with something like a big round fan on top of it and no one inside. A self-driving taxi, again the first I’d seen. I honestly walked backward away from it. When I next scrolled my phone, the ad popped up, “Need a ride to the beach? You need Waymo!” Nope.

On our way back – on foot -- from the Convention Center, by the entrance of the pretty Hope + Flower apartments, a security bot was stationed. A 5-foot-tall fat white cone on wheels, covered with panels for who knows what menacing accessories inside. We pretended we were ignoring it, until it turned to track our passing. Jessica, unnerved, went back and crossed it again to be sure; it pivoted silently left, right. No thank you.

But yes, it was there on our way to more sessions the next day, too. On our way back it was gone and Jessica screamed relief and good riddance into the empty space on the sidewalk. Alas, on the third day it was back, now with a go-box of coffee on the ground beside it.

When did paying a friendly human to watch over our coming and going become less effective? (And what becomes of the human who lost that job; is he among the many shambling by on blackened feet behind his shopping cart, checking discarded wrappers on the curb?)

The delivery bots have names on them; from the dozens I saw all week I remember Shea, Mickey, Amanda. This, like the Minion eyes, is a good trick. Maybe they are friendly, like pets. Maybe they work together, maybe Mickey and Amanda fall in love. No such magic for the guards or cars, though, which are too big to not feel ominous. I don’t understand what we’re protecting that isn’t precious enough for us to keep our own eyes on it. I don’t understand how far we are trying to go -- from only as far as our legs and backs could carry us; to only as far as another living creature, horse or camel or elephant, could carry us or pull our cart; to at least laying our hand on the crank or key or button to turn over the engine that brings the car to life.

I return to spring quarter classes. Never before have I been aware of so many students in my English Composition classroom translating everything we do. It’s no longer just the trace of original Mandarin left in a homework post or email, but all during class now, to complete worksheets and free writes, moving all my curriculum into a vessel they can grasp. My words, flung into the air, are plainly some alien way of knowing -- but also the way that’s been prescribed to them, so classroom tables full of them are plugging the handfuls they can catch into clarifying devices. Then they contemplate as fast as they can, through the devices which seem to me now augmentations like hearing aids or retinal implants, and which scramble back a response I can give them credit for.

I’m not convinced that this is the right prescription, that this American campus is a better path than one where everything grows in the familiar language. I’m not sure why these students must re-make themselves this way, rigging extra-brain machinery to get this degree. What bigger machine are they battling? Could this be a better, stronger, more streamlined way of learning; what kinds of machines am I helping build here?

In hard moments this week I felt like an assembly line worker inserting the language box as each bionic-body moves down the belt and beyond me. I worry that the home I’ve made in the classroom will soon feel as unfamiliar to me as the place I grew up. When faced with a cyborg, the question driving each character has always been, “is this thing real?” But the question driving the whole story is, “what even is real?” It might be our breath, heartbeat, our very special minds; or it might be some other engine, and the things our very special minds keep building to outdo ourselves.