from the depths of the night

on saturday, september 26, de profundis, the book club, turned one. we celebrated at rock n ron, in cusco, with bands, poets, and a lot of new faces. i asked for a slot to speak for five minutes. this is the video:

on that same date, in 1983, stanislav petrov was on duty in a soviet bunker. the computer told him five missiles were coming. he didn't believe it. it was sunlight reflecting off the clouds. that night marked 43 years.

what i said

five minutes, no slides. the speech had two tracks. the time track: petrov had minutes and he waited; we raced to build another machine without giving ourselves time. the brain track: in 1983 it was easy to doubt a machine with no brain; today ai writes, codes, diagnoses, and every year it does it better.

i started without saying who the man was:

a man is on duty. his job: trust a computer.

i told the night in the bunker in the present tense and asked the room what each of them would have done. then i lit the candle, for everyone who's gone, those of us still alive, and those not yet born, and recited part of my poem:

we looked at the mind as the owner of time,
and we believed time would always wait for us.
we raced to create you without giving ourselves time,
and you grew at the speed of time,
and born of our own calculation,
you snatched our notion of time away.
we believed we had time.
we believed we had time.

when they asked petrov why he doubted, he answered: "the computer simply lacks a brain". in 1983 that sentence made perfect sense. today, with ai, it's less and less true. and every year it gets harder for us to doubt a computer.

before closing, i went back to the poem:

ai, give us time.
how long have we needed more time?
how long since we last gave ourselves more time?
ai, let's give ourselves time.

and i ended by thanking twice:

stanislav petrov, who from the depths of the night, in a bunker, gave all of us time. and de profundis, which for a year now has been giving us time to read together. thank you so much for your time.

de profundis means "from the depths". i liked that both things fit in the same sentence.

the 26th, twice

there's a funny moment. i say "today, september 26, marks 43 years", and right after: "september 26, sorry". on stage i felt i had said the 23rd. watching the video, i said the 26th both times. i corrected something that was already right... the nerves.

on the inside

i was so focused on not forgetting anything that i didn't watch people's faces. it felt like more pressure than with slides, because nothing reminded me what came next. i used a book as a guide for the structure, but still. i didn't move with confidence, didn't use my body or my tone to be firm, didn't move around the stage. it was my first time reciting, and i was very nervous.

before it, i had a little wine to relax. the funny part is that i was making myself numb right where i needed to be alert. it did help, but not as much as i wanted. i was afraid that if i drank more it would cloud my head. but maybe then more of my expression would have come out, i don't know. the thing is expression.

someone there told me to practice right there, before starting. i didn't want to, because i was nervous. now i think it would have gone better.

afterward

people came up to me. one said that if that man had been american, it might not have happened. another talked about ai and said it only steals other people's work. someone else said they liked the talk. and one person told me they thought i was going to talk about quechua, or cusco, because my name is yupanqui.

a week earlier i had told the same story with slides, at a ppt party. there, people argued. with the candle, people came up to tell me what they thought.

watching myself again

watching the video, it went better than it felt. the nerves show, but the story lands. and what i see most is that i enjoyed it. i truly felt it.

i like talking about the topics i care about, and i need to improve to reach more people.

next time i want to express myself more freely.