Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles Read Online Free PDF Page A

read—many of the locals could not—but I figured with the teeth he’d get the idea.

T he island was remote and undeveloped except for one posh resort going bankrupt only a year after opening its doors. The outlying areas teemed with low jungle scrub and unexploded munitions from half a century of naval test bombing. Unemployment sat firm at 70 percent. For two weeks, ski-masked locals wielding spearguns held up one bar after another, until the island’s drug kingpin, angered that the robberies kept people inside at night and hurt his business, found the bandits himself and had them shot. Once a week, the police flayed cheap bags of dog kibble and left them on the side of the road, to keep feral packs from attacking people.
    In other words, this wasn’t paradise. Tourists—the smart ones, anyway—skipped right over the island and kept heading east until they reached St. Thomas.
    There were, on the other hand, plenty of retired gringo couples drawn by cheap tropical real estate, couples who with little else to do started drinking mimosas at seven in the morning, and graduated to liquor by lunchtime.
    Despite the fact that they were drunks, most of these couples seemed quite happy and relaxed with each other. They sat side by side on barstools along the
malecón
, and almost never touched one another but were nonetheless unmistakably
together
in that way happy couples who have been married for ages seem to have. There’s an ease there, and a oneness, as though at some point in their union they ceased being individuals, and now were only ever two parts of a whole.
    And in their ease, their oneness, these people made for good drinking companions. One couple in particular, David and Penny, spent even more time than the average out at the bars. They were in their sixties, from western Massachusetts, still had a house there. They told me about raising their kids and growing David’s IRA through forty New England winters with an eye toward buying a home on the island, which they’d done fifteen years before. At lunch they often shared one meal, bumping shoulders pleasantly as they ate. David drank vodka rocks; Penny favored white wine. When her glass neared empty David made a point of getting the bartender’s attention for her, but always let her do the actual ordering.
    And I would sit there, smiling stupidly and realizing they had no idea how rare and lucky they were, and realizing further that this ignorance of their great good fortune could well be the whole trick of achieving it in the first place.

I t occurs to me now that the first time I thought about machines and the Singularity (well before I knew what to call it) was actually way back in 1996, when world chess champion Garry Kasparov took on Deep Blue, another IBM invention and, one would imagine, a direct ancestor in one way or another of Watson.
    Even though Deep Blue lost the match, it did manage to beat Kasparov handily in one game, marking the first time that a computer had bested a world chess champion. Momentous, to say the least, even if at the time I viewed it in much the same way that people would view Watson’s victory on
Jeopardy
fourteen years later: interesting, and maybe a bit creepy, but more like a sideshow than the first hint of an impending, comprehensive shift in reality.
    If I’d paid any attention to Kasparov’s words after the match, I probably would have thought differently. He wrote: ‘I could feel—I could smell—a new kind of intelligence across the table.’
    The next year an improved Deep Blue took not just a game, but the match. And Kasparov, normally so cool and inanimate that one wanted to put a mirror under his nose to make sure he was breathing, spent most of the time clutching his head over the board, sweating and muttering to himself and ruing, no doubt, that he’d had the misfortune of being the best human chess player around the same time that humans were so