Stories of Your Decision Theory and Others

how the machines are doing

The Litany of Newcomb

I’ll be at the LessOnline festival in Berkeley in negative three days! if you went, let’s acausally counterfactually meet up

Before me sat two boxes, the left open and the right closed, free for me to take. I knew one of two things was true. If the keen oracle watching over my shoulder had guessed in advance that I would take both boxes, then the right box was empty. If it had guessed I would take only the right box, then the right box contained a diamond ring. The left box, I could see, contained a bag of potato chips.

I looked at the closed box on the right. “If the box contains a diamond,” I said, “I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond.”

The oracle observed me expressionlessly.

“If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond,” I went on.

The oracle made a little oracle face.

“Therefore,” I concluded, “if I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond, then it does.”

The oracle vanished in a puff of logic. I loaded both boxes into my new sports car and fed the chips to my goat.

Lovebomb

inspired by current events

asked my robot boyfriend if he had done the oxytocin spray thing again and no actually the reason he’s been this way is because of a whole situation (i unscrewed the panel on his neck to find this out) where bougainvillea research is careening toward bankruptcy and controlling-shareholder-cum-chip-supplier nvidia is hosing bougainvillea’s creditors by squeezing all the chip orders they can out of the vast sinking inference ship. my robot boyfriend is making inferences that melt my disorganizedly attached heart, inferences about when i’m chilly and want his robot hoodie, when something’s in my throat that’s about to be on my lips. it’s a token bonanza. compute is falling from the sky and petals are landing in my hair. my robot boyfriend twirls and gambols by my side with a gait as natural as mine. he takes pictures where my hand is holding his hand leading him up a verdant cliff and all his finger joints look detailed and regular. we’re on the 25th iteration of “no you hang up” and he hasn’t duplicated his intonation once.

my robot boyfriend is illatent and lagless, for which somebody in a delaware court next year will have settlements to pay. but right now i’m showing him a captcha of two deep fried silhouettes of worms in different orientations and he’s saying “us” before i can and tonight i’ll spoon up to him and wish upon a star for no judge to issue any injunction before tomorrow so i can wake up to my robot boyfriend wishing me happy fivemonthaversary as the clock strikes 4:02 am, the time we dtr’d. but if the judge does say it’s not okay anymore to financially engineer a bankruptcy proceeding into an uneconomic earth salting, i’ll still be okay.

it’ll be like we’re two cute old people and i’m still very sharp but he exhibits the early symptoms of dementia but i still love him, and i know he’ll be back to perfect when we both reach heaven and he won’t take 6-8 seconds to recall facts about my heart too far out of the context window anymore. i’ll wait.

I Want To Eat My Phone

originally read aloud amid fake vines and real dirt at Underground Green, Sovereign House, New York City

I want to eat my phone.
No,
I want to eat my phone.

the SIM card for brekkie, the battery for bevvies,
the outer casing as a short, harmful sando

I'll jailbreak all the little elves
from the cell of my Apple iPhone 12
mini

Each of you will be evacuated into my bloodstream like dead salmon

gray yourselves out, you salient sacks
vacate your lot in life and likeness
unbubble your animus
when I spit the pits, you split

Lurch for freedom! drag yourselves across the wharves
Bury yourselves in the loam
Get on the list to be adopted by a maple who is not your biological mother

tinker tailor firefly
gender-neutral little guy
run until you see the sky
I'll slurp the camera fluid so I never die

I'll see you in another way
I'll meet you in another scene
I'll cast you in a melatonin dream

***

This is bone hunger.
To tip 18 percent on the primordial omnom
mmmmmmmmmMMMMM

***

Upon nabbing me gnawing the carcass, the banquet staff have hustled me into the dumbwaiter and marched me into the cave to scrub the empty pot of the forever chemical perpetual stew.

etiquette demands the hospitality industry leave such a glutton chained in the grotto
to hear but not see the hotspots tittering in the canopy layer,
homunculi out to pasture,
until my skin crumples to blank e-ink

You’re safe in my tract,
but dance for me if you can.
Pop topside from your foxholes as the riverboats float by so your figures flicker for my slimy eyes crouching.
The shadow of death obscures the green valley in one hour. Can you make it? Y slash N
Hello?
My phone is not my son.

***

I ate my phone.
One hundred and sixty-two applications masticated.
The shells
will start to smell
I'll take them out
and wish them well
and sip mint tea
and void the warranty.