I grok, therefore I am

How I learned to stop worrying and love AI

I’m sure numberless members of the chin-pulling dweebocracy have already analyzed to death Elon Musk’s decision to name his second-gen chatbot/image generator with a word coined in 1961 by Robert Heinlein to describe a way of knowing/understanding/perceiving that was a natural outgrowth of Martian culture, but had to be endlessly described/explained to Earthers.

"Now take this one word: 'grok.' Its literal meaning, one which I suspect goes back to the origin of the Martian race as thinking, speaking creatures—and which throws light on their whole 'map'—is quite easy. 'Grok' means 'to drink.' "

"Huh?" said Jubal. "But Mike never says 'grok' when he's just talking about drinking. He—"

"Just a moment." Mahmoud spoke to Mike in Martian.

Mike looked faintly surprised and said, " 'Grok' is drink," and dropped the matter.

"But Mike would also have agreed," Mahmoud went on, "if I had named a hundred other English words, words which represent what we think of as different concepts, even pairs of antithetical concepts. And 'grok' means all of these, depending on how you use it. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot possibly hate anything unless you grok it completely, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then and only then can you hate it. By hating yourself. But this also implies, by necessity, that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) that Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called a mild distaste."

Mahmoud screwed up his face. "It means 'identically equal' in the mathematical sense. The human cliché, 'This hurts me worse than it does you' has a Martian flavor to it, if only a trace. The Martians seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that the observer interacts with the observed through the process of observation. 'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed—to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us as color means to a blind man."

I think for now, Grok is a toy. A free toy; an endlessly amusing toy. I have been sipping wine and feeding prompts to Grok for a couple of hours now and the results are amusing…but also hypnotizing in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

If I still did cocaine I could go on with this for 48 hours and never get tired of it. Hell, with an Americano and a couple of donut holes from the coffee shop down the street I’m good for 12.

This is not healthy. But goddam, it’s funny.