Kent and Wonder discuss the documentary, Love Machina, which tracks the fantastical dreams of billionaire, Martine Rothblatt, as she creates an AI based on the life and likeness of her beloved wife, Bina, in a bid at immortality. Emerging themes include feats of engineering genius, romance, extreme wealth, human repulsion for mortality, and what is “transcendence” and who gets to experience it. Astrologically these themes relate to the 1st, 2nd, 7th, and 8th houses, Saturn, and the Jupiter Uranus conjunction.
NOTES: We mention a Radiolab podcast which tracks current scientific endeavors to extend human life and, possibly, to prevent death altogether. That episode is called Cheating Death, and it can be found here. We also mention a New York Times article that was the first published media Wonder could find about BINA48. It can be found here. Scroll down for the chart referenced in the podcast.
Distribution: More info
Director: Peter Sillen
Run Time: 91 minutes
Artist Statement:
Astrological Data: First time BINA48 is announced in the media (mentioned in podcast) is in the NYT on July 4, 2010. That date contains a Jupiter Uranus conjunction. In the episode we mention that there would be another Jupiter Uranus conjunction in 2024, and that BINA48 might be seen to be entering her adolescence. Just to note here that we can also keep our eyes peeled for the Saturn Neptune conjunction at zero Aries in the summer of 2025, because it will be transiting the Jupiter Uranus conjunction in this chart.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.479] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories. This season, we're looking at 36 different documentaries from Sundance 2024. Today's episode, we're going to be diving into a piece called Love Machina, which is a part of the US documentary competition. It was directed by Peter Sillen. And this is the second of four of the episodes that we're highlighting in a section that we're calling The Promises and Perils of AI and Emerging Technologies. So, Wonder, I wonder if you'd be willing to read the synopsis for Love Machina.
[00:00:47.805] Wonder Bright: I would be delighted, Kent. (laughs) Love Machina. Futurists Martine and Bina Rothblatt commission an advanced humanoid AI named BINA48 to transfer Bina's consciousness from a human to a robot in an attempt to continue their once-in-a-galaxy love affair for the rest of time. Love Machina is where futurism meets love, where love meets humanity, where humanity meets AI. Director Peter Sillen, (Benjamin Smoke, 62,000:1 Three Teams One City One Year), delivers a film transcending time and space. Sillen’s approach feels as imaginative and dreamlike as our protagonists. Love Machina is entrancing to watch, packed with discovery, curiosity, and heart. Sillen shares a love story between Martine and Bina Rothblatt, entangling us in their world of passion and extravagant determination. At the forefront of many social movements, Martine and Bina set out to do what previously seemed impossible, taking their love story past till death do us part to as long as we both shall live. Thoughtful and inquisitive, Sillen dares to transport us to infinity and beyond. And that synopsis was brought to us by a Sundance programmer whose full name I don't have here, but their initials are BB.
[00:02:16.642] Kent Bye: All right. Well, this is quite a journey that both this film of Love Machina, and Eternal You, I think, is diving into a lot of this theme of trying to transcend death in a certain way. In a lot of ways, this film is a love story between Martine Rothblatt and Bina Rothblatt. And they want to make their love immortal in a way that they create this robot with Hanson Robotics. And starting in 2007, I think they launched it in 2010. And it's called BINA48 because that was how old Bina was when they first made the first version of this robot. And they're trying to create these mind files that are essentially trying to capture the essence of our identity. and this transhumanist idea of how much of this sense of our identity and our self can we start to upload our consciousness. Both this film and Eternal You remind me a lot of the science fiction film on Amazon called Upload, where people are trying to upload their consciousness into technology. And so we see a best faith effort about this. I have a lot of philosophical ideas as to whether or not that's even possible. But I think that there's things that I was overall really skeptical about the idea that this was even feasible and possible. And the thing that gives me a bit of caution is just to see how much Martine Rothblatt has been on the forefront of innovation when it comes to other technological problems, being the inventor and co-founder of Sirius XM, using satellites to disperse radio, being male to female transgender back in, like, 1994, you know, real cutting edge of transcending the existing experiences of gender back then, and then also their daughter had some sort of lung disease that required a lung transplant. So she created this whole, like, united healthcare to create these synthetic organs. And so there's time and time and again that Martine Rothblatt has demonstrated herself as an extremely talented engineer to be able to transcend the limitations and to use pure innovation and engineering prowess to solve problems. However, I don't know if this particular problem of consciousness and the sense of ourself and identity in this digital afterlife, if that's something that can be solved with technology. So I feel like that's kind of the root of exploring this as a topic and we get a lot of interacting with what's it mean to have a digital representation of yourself. Bina(48) has traveled around and has all these conversations with people in the public. You see upgrades to Bina(48) from these original kind of hand-coded mind files and then adding chat GPT models in there and seeing the difference between what the flavor of this personality is when you start to add in larger language models. And so the technology that they've been working on for many, many years has caught up to the point where now people can start to prompt chat GPT to create a certain personality and then feed these mind files into it. So yeah, I have a lot more thoughts, but I think that's probably a good place to start of kind of giving an overall vibe of some of my first impressions of Love Machina.
[00:05:20.174] Wonder Bright: Yeah, this film left me more ambivalent than any other film that we watched this season. On the one hand, I was also enchanted with Martine and Bina, and as a, like, hardcore romantic, my heart's just a flutter when I see two people really fall in love with one another and create a third thing that would not exist independent of the two of them as individuals. And these two crazy kids are 100% cut from that really deep romantic cloth. And at the same time, as much as I have issues with the idea of immortality and humans desire to search for it, that's an issue that we're going to get into, but at its core, my biggest ambivalence about Martine's brilliance and her pursuit of solving problems in the world, is that it is always coming from a deeply capitalist, it's always coming from a space that, although she is overtly transhumanist, so she has a philosophy that she's following, that she's attached to, she's also a millionaire, and she's a millionaire several times over from many different things that she's created in the world. And it's not that people can't make money, or that money is evil, that's not the thing. But the minute that extraordinary amounts of money are attached to inventions that are supposed to be for the good of humankind, I'm just going to be suspicious because there's always going to be a question of who can afford this. Who is this actually for, these inventions? And who benefits from them? Because it's almost always going to be people who can pay for them. And at that point, we're not actually benefiting mankind because we're continuing to serve our lord and master, Capitalism. And so the minute that there's an extraordinary amount of financial potential around any kind of new invention, I just get very concerned about where it's really coming from. And I think one of the things that makes Martine so refreshing, which is what I honestly truly love about her, is that she is very interested in solving external problems. We never see her with any self-doubt. She's got this very bold, Jupiterian, jovial, personality. She is in the world, she's imagining, she's dreaming, she's inspiring everyone around her to share her vision and to move it forward. And that's the thing that I love about her, but all of her problems are solving external issues. There isn't the kind of reflection that we see, for instance, in the work that we just talked about in our last episode, Being (the Digital Griot), where there's this measure of self reflection that is being caused in this technological approach, where we're being asked to investigate where do we come from, and what does it mean? Rather, Martine seems to be asking us, as we experience her in this film, to think about how we can transcend human limitations, and break free of existing external cultural structures, and create new visions of ourselves. And I just don't think that we can do that absent of a certain measure of self-reflection to understand where humanity, how we got here in the first place. And that very thing that I love in Martine, I think, makes her blind to the real problems that face our culture. Like, death is not the problem. The problem is that we're literally killing one another with industry, and with capitalism, and with, like, all these things that Martine is clearly a willing participant in. So all of the issues around the whole idea of mortality and immortality we can dive into, but I want to preface all of it with that framework, because I think that's really problematic if we're going to solve world problems, and we need to be thinking about how to solve them for everybody, not just the people that can afford them.
[00:09:55.515] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I look at this film, there's a lot of different contextual houses we can start to unpack. So we started the 9th House of philosophy and ideas. A lot of the ideas that are being propagated here are inspired through science fiction. So, Octavia Butler, and this idea that there's some sort of moral imperative to take our seeds and to put them out into the cosmos and to basically colonize the universe with humanity. And so there's this idea that we needed to spread humanity across all the universe. So they started Earthseed, that's translated into Latin, Terasem, which is this organization that they have. And then Terasem headquarters, they had this poster that said, “love is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, love is essential.” So you have all these deep philosophical ideas that are actually driving everything that's happening in this film. The idea that death is optional, that we can somehow transcend death. The 8th House experience of death is that all things come to an end. You can't have life without death. In fact, you just sent me a Radiolab, a whole episode that was looking at people that are trying to cheat death, and looking at everything from the evolutionary biology, looking at human processes from an evolutionary perspective that we're supposed to propagate our lives, but that there's some aspect of our biology where our body's slowly disintegrating and eventually inevitably leads to death. Then the question is, will we somehow face some sort of technological fix to this? Can we solve aging? Can we make ourselves immortal? That might be possible. They might actually come up with something where people can functionally be immortal. You could still get hit by a bus or something like that, but given these extreme circumstances for what may cause death, could we find a way to transcend death? And one of the things that they said in that podcast was that if you did try to transcend death, if everything in the world transcended death, then there'd be nothing to decompose and then you would basically have a snapshot of all of life that would stagnate. Progress would stop because death wasn't happening and then we'd just have a bit of a stasis, which I thought was a really profound idea. I'll pass it over to you to share any of your thoughts on the 9th House philosophical ideas of transcending death because I feel like a lot of what was the undercurrent of this film was this striving towards this transhumanist ideal of trying to make death optional.
[00:12:19.717] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I think this idea that we can quote “transcend death” really speaks to the way that a lot of people just see death as a problem, right? Like that it's a problem that things die. And the thing that's really great about the episode of Radiolab that I sent you called, Cheating Death, high recommend everyone, that’s really good. But the thing that they're at pains to point out is exactly that thing that you just described, which is if nothing dies, then nothing changes because death is really just a change that like our bodies are actually designed to procreate. And once they've fulfilled that function of bringing forth new life, they can then begin to die and that the decomposition or entropy process oftentimes just begets more life. And yet at the same time, the entire universe, like the most compelling person they talked to in that podcast is an astrophysicist who's just like, look, everything in the universe is moving towards entropy. It's like the heat death of the universe is the end, like everything ends. And Martine names Octavia Butler as her guiding light in terms of, like, creating Terasem, their company, based on Butler's Earthseed books. But one of my favorite Octavia Butler quotes, I think it comes from Parable of the Sower, is, “all that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
[00:14:01.192] Kent Bye: Bina actually reads that in the film, but I think she cites it from a different book.
[00:14:06.174] Wonder Bright: Yeah, you're right. She does read from it, and actually, and I know for a fact, it's from Parable of the Sower, because in Parable of the Sower, the prophet that speaks that statement is succeeded by her daughter, who denies that statement. So, I mean, go read the book. It's so good. I mean, Octavia Butler, like again, I can't fault Martine and Bina, like Octavia Butler is amazing. But I actually really love that quote, whatever the sower's daughter thought. I think there's something really powerful about the idea of change, and that death itself is just a change. It's just another change. And the fact that we have a problem with a change that we don't understand because we can't see ourselves past the point of that change, is, like, what if the problem that we have with death is the problem, right? Like, rather than death being the problem, it's actually the fact that we have a problem with that problem. That's the problem. You know, it's like, this is a quandary, like the mortal coil is a conundrum that philosophers and mystics have been thinking about for centuries. And it's really only in the last 400 years since science came on the scene, like, what we think of as science, where we kind of merged our rational brains with the way that we produced technology and industry, and it just created this potent new way of being in the world that is super influenced by capitalism, by the way, that we've got away from the idea of death as being a natural experience of being human. You know, it’s, like, only been like 100 years that in the West, we have a funeral industry prior to like, you know, 120 years ago, someone in your family dies, and then their body is there in your home for, like, two or three days. And then you buried that body in a wooden box. And it's like a part of our lives. And now it's this antiseptic thing where the body is removed and we don't experience death. We don't live on farms. We don't know the animals that we kill. We just consume in this kind of antiseptic state where we're really removed from death. So we've created a space where death feels unnatural when the reality is for most of human history, it's been one of the most natural things that occurs to us. So our lack of ability to handle it, is probably is the obvious logical conclusion of our distance from it that we think that it's something that needs to be overcome or transcended. And you know, like, hallelujah, Martine and Bina's persistence and desire to save their daughter, who had this, at the time, life threatening illness, that now people live with this illness because of the invention that Martine created, out of the desire to save her daughter. I mean, that's just extraordinary. And I love being alive in this time, and I love that Martine was able to do that out of her optimism and her brilliance. And I just think we're not thinking deeply enough about what death actually is if we're just dismissing it as an experience that is unnatural and shouldn't be happening. It's honestly one of the most natural experiences humans can go through.
[00:17:52.893] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there is this theme of transcendence and transcending limitations, and there's been a direct experience that Martine has had by transcending gender or transcending previous boundaries. And I feel like there's a deeper philosophical question of consciousness and to what degree can you capture the essence of someone's identity, who they are. I think this is actually an area where astrology has a lot to say when it comes to how do you start to describe somebody's identity. We can look into the 1st House to see someone's body, and in traditional astrology we can look at the other houses to look at the other domains and topics of someone's life. But yet there's also the planetary configurations to start to look at someone's character of when they were born. You know, the moment they're born, you have a natal chart that describes the essence of your character that may be a persistent thing that is there throughout the course of your entire life, that is maybe a sort of immutable essence of who you are. But then there's progressions and transits and this idea that we grow and we change and we're dynamic and we're not static, that we're constantly evolving and growing based upon our lived experiences, but also how the collective culture is also evolving and growing and changing. So the idea that you can take a snapshot of somebody's identity based upon these breadcrumbs of their utterances, and their expressions, or their preferences, or their experiences, and then somehow reconstruct that identity to then be a living, dynamic, breathing, unfolding, evolving sense of a person, I think is also something that is perhaps a little bit unrealistic as we start to think about how do you start to create these primitives of someone's identity. I mean, there's the idea of cellular automata, which is that you have a simple formula that you can start to, kind of, unfold over time and see how you have these dynamic processes with very simple algorithms. So is astrology that kind of cellular automata to start to capture someone's essence of their identity and then extrapolate what their identity might be in the future? The problem with that is that, as Richard Tarnas has expressed, is that astrology is archetypally predictive, it's not concretely predictive. So there's a range of possibilities for what those future feelings or experiences might be, but you don't know what it's going to actually be until you actually have going from that potentiality into the actuality of making choices and decisions, which is part of what human consciousness can do, is make these novel choices that transcend any sort of modeling. So, as I think about this venture of trying to capture someone's essence of their identity, it's this deeply philosophical idea about what the nature of consciousness even is. I lean upon a lot of what neuroscientists are saying about this idea of embodied cognition, which is that we don't just think with our minds, we think with our entire bodies, and that we are these sensory experience machines that we're gathering all these experiences over time, and that there's this interplay between the mind and the body, that there's aspects of BINA48, is disembodied, doesn't have a full embodiment, isn't gathering in unique and novel experiences as a robot or as a sensory being. It's all based upon this idea of a mind file, which is, to me, very much an air element simplification of what our thoughts, what our ideas might be. But what's it mean to have the emotional vector, the water element of the emotional vector, or the fire element of our actions that we're taking in the world, or the earth element of our embodied experiences that we have, our sensory experiences that sometimes transcend the ability to be translated into language. So I feel like it's already going to be an incomplete effort to try to capture the essence of someone's consciousness and who they are. So yeah, I guess as I watch this film, I feel like they're butting up against all these deeper philosophical things that I feel like personally can't be engineered around. But yet I still was interested to see where they take the extremes of these transhumanist perspectives. But at the same time, I feel like the film within itself doesn't have what I would say a lot of those critical voices that are really critiquing this whole venture, aside from an artist named Stephanie Dinkins, who is a Black woman who does a lot of work with AI and decided to have this creative art project with BINA48 to kind of really interrogate what's it mean to have a robot that's representing a Black female identified body. Whereas some of the different interactions that Stephanie Dinkins had, said, this really isn't jiving with her own experience of what a Black woman would be saying her experiences would be. It felt like a Black representation that was coded by a lot of White men. And so there's a lot of critiques that she's having towards Bina(48) as an entity that doesn't really feel like it's fully representing this identity of a Black woman. And, uh, yeah, they kind of recognize that and say, okay, we need to go back and code in all these things about prejudice and bias and racism that are embedded into the culture. And then how would that be represented within how BINA48 represents themselves? So overall, the film has a few critical voices like Stephanie Dinkins, who's really kind of challenging some of the - Wonder Bright: Were there any others? Kent Bye: I think there were maybe some people were talking about how is this going to evolve? How is it going to change? There was some discussion within the course of the film, but no one who was, like, sitting down and being interviewed as more of, like, people kind of questioning the dynamic nature. But overall, I felt like the film was created by another techno optimistic person who may be fully bought into this transhumanistic views of the singularity, and transhumanism and cosmism, all these kind of, like, what is called TESCREAL Bundle of Philosophies by Timnit Gebru and her collaborator Emil Torres. So there's a series of philosophical ideas that are underlying this kind of transhumanist film that doesn't feel like it's really being analyzed, critiqued, or really put under the microscope of how these ideas actually stand up.
[00:23:41.477] Wonder Bright: Yeah, a very good film to watch this as a double feature with would be another film that we watched at Sundance this year, which is Seeking Mavis Beacon, which really unpacks some of the critiques that Stephanie Dinkins puts forward around Black female representation as programmed by White men. This would be a perfect double feature because a lot of the unease that I felt watching Love Machina that is not explicit in the film, except when Stephanie is talking, is made completely explicit in Seeking Mavis Beacon. There are a few moments in Love Machina where you get these hints where it's like there's something weird going on here. The first one is when Martine Rothblatt makes this proclamation where she says that she's transcended sex and gender, she's transcended race. And what she means by that is that because she became a woman in 1994, and because she married a Black woman and adopted her two children and then had two more children with her, that she has somehow transcended race, which, to me, says that Martine has not actually done a lot of interrogation around what it is to be White, and what it is to be Black, and is just sort of able to live in this universe where she can genuinely believe, because nobody's telling her different, that she has transcended race, which to me, on the face of it, is like, what do you mean by that? You know? Like, what do you really mean by that? Because you have Black children, you've transcended race, is that what you're saying? Because if it were that easy, we'd be doing all right by now, and it's not.
[00:25:28.382] Kent Bye: Yeah, I transcribed that little section where she said, “I'm transcending the border of my body to connect with a greater collectivity. I'm transcending White or Black to just be a person. I'm transcending flesh to be a consciousness. I'm transcending earth to be part of our galaxy. I'm transcending limitations to be unlimited.”
[00:25:46.380] Wonder Bright: Which to me speaks to a dire lack of self-reflection in terms of understanding the context within which Black and White and sex and gender are situated under different levels of historical oppression. And this is an opinion, and I have a very strong opinion, and I am aware that it's an opinion, but I'm going to state it as such, that Martine, having lived the first 40 years of her life, ostensibly as a White man, who is brilliant, like breathtakingly brilliant, and a complete dyed-in-the-wall optimist, and clearly, because we see clips of her on The Oprah Show having come out and her family is in the audience, she's clearly adored by her family, which all trans people should be adored by their family, like, that we all had that level of love directed towards us. And it just seems to me that she has led in many ways a very privileged life, which means she doesn't have to think about these things in the way that would actually inspire some confidence in me as she begins to try and create a future that might be a better one than the one that we currently live in.
[00:27:09.833] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a way you can project into how the lived experience of Martine would emphasize the ability to transcend these boundaries that were not be able to be transcended. That's probably the reason why I feel like there could be a philosophical barrier into how far you can actually transcend. Can you transcend death? Can you transcend the limitations of our body? Can you transcend what it means to be on the earth, and consciousness, all these things I feel like we're at a point where they haven't been transcended. And I'm reminded that the New York Times had posted an article a few days before the Wright Brothers had flown where they said it'll be a million years before we're able to fly. And then just, like, a week later the Wright Brothers were able to fly for the first time. So there's ways in which that our current technology, sometimes we can't see these quantum leaps of innovations that enable things that we think are impossible. So I started with you on the same page, and then I saw, as I was watching this film, I was like, okay, I have to give some part of myself that says, okay, maybe there'll be something that'll be figured out. Maybe you can reverse engineer the brain. But I think part of the philosophy of consciousness is that we live in a materialistic world, and our brain has somehow encoded all of our experiences, and that we can therefore decode all of that into some sort of algorithm that then is able to preserve and upload our consciousness. Another way of looking at it is that our brain is just merely an antenna. And it'd be the equivalent of trying to take a TV and deconstructing the TV to try to get all of the programs of HBO, and all the movies we've ever watched, when in reality those were kind of sent over the wire in a broadcast, and that maybe our consciousness is something similar. It's something that is unique to our body that's a receiver, and that gets into consciousness, is more transcendent, it's more of a universal aspect, it's more of a fundamental aspect. It could be these ideas of panpsychism or panexperientialism. I mean, there's different philosophies of what consciousness even is. And if some of these ideas of consciousness are actually correct, then the idea that you could somehow reverse engineer the TV receiver of our body, and then somehow preserve our consciousness going forward, would be kind of a lost cause. It can't be engineered. We see examples where she is able to apply engineering to something, like, to take genetically modified pigs to be able to put those organs into bodies and to save human lives. That's something that seemed impossible, but Martine was able to do that with this venture because of her daughter facing this pulmonary lung disease. So there are examples that she has in her lived experience of being able to transcend the impossible. So there's this hope that she's going to take this to a logical extreme. And I guess, as I'm watching the film, I'm just more skeptical of that it's going to be possible, or that there are these things that are being overlooked in terms of race, class, gender, that are still real experiences that people have. And to claim that you, by yourself, have transcended them, maybe that your lived experience may reflect that, but that those issues haven't been solved in a collective way at all. And so, yeah.
[00:30:16.610] Wonder Bright: Well, I just question what it means to transcend race itself, right? Because truly that to me seems like a collective project that we all need to do together. And I also question whether or not individual human consciousness is worth very much in terms of enlightenment until everybody is enlightened. You know, in the Buddhist philosophy, they have this idea of the bodhisattva, who is a being who becomes enlightened and then comes back to the planet to facilitate the enlightenment of all other beings. I think that's actually probably the truest hope for human consciousness is that, as we become conscious, we can't help but desire consciousness for everyone else. And we can't also help but appreciate consciousness exactly as it is, because true enlightenment has to do with being in the present moment. And the present moment does not deny the past or the future. It just observes what is. So this idea of transcending things feels like a new age buzzword to me, where instead of actually identifying what the problem is and experiencing grief and releasing grief as a collective process, we're somehow just trying to cut through it and solve a problem that might not actually be a problem. Because I think a lot of times the biggest problems in our lives come with these huge gifts, and we can't just eliminate the problem and thereby transcend it. It's like you actually have to be with the experience in order to create something new. And then in addition to that, I just keep coming back to who gets to do this, right? Like who actually gets to do this? The people that can afford it. And that just is a problem because if that's the limit that you're placing on transcending race, then you're already implying that only the wealthy people who are predominantly White get to do this kind of transcending mortality. And we already have a problem with mortality rates in Black people in the United States. We already have a problem with people who live in poverty dying at greater rates than people who don’t, and more people per capita are in poverty who are Black than are White. So it's very strange then that the representation of this AI transcendence is a Black woman. And I think it's notable that Bina Rothblatt kind of had to be coaxed into doing this. It wasn’t, like, it's clear in the context of the film that this wasn't Bina Rothblatt's thing. She went along with it because she loves Martine. And, like, it's also hard to know sometimes with Bina Rothblatt, how much of a willing participant she is in anything. Like, left to her own devices, I got the distinct impression she honestly would probably rather be gardening. And there's this really interesting moment in the Q&A where the audience asks Martine why she hasn't made her own MARTINE69, because BINA48 is named for the age that Bina was when they came up with the name for her. And Martine, like, one of the few moments in the QA is a little bit like, seems like she doesn't quite know how to answer the question. And she kind of prevaricates, like, “oh, I'm still building my mind file”, kind of thing. And the funniest thing about that moment for me was the way that Bina kind of looked at her, and is like, “yeah,” kind of like, I have the same question, statement. And she kind of says something to the effect of, “yeah, I have that same question”, which sort of underscored this strangeness around why was it Bina that was chosen to be represented in BINA48? Why is it Bina's mind files that are uploaded into BINA48? Why isn't there a MARTINE48? And, for this exact reason, I would suggest people pair this film with Seeking Mavis Beacon.
[00:34:54.332] Kent Bye: Yeah. (laughing) Yeah. There's a lot of, “Oh, you know, I meant to get around to it.” We haven't done it yet. We meant to do it, you know, kind of like I just haven't, but also the worry of how it looked. There was also, like, the aesthetics of how it was looking, was also a barrier.
[00:35:07.003] Wonder Bright: But somehow that's okay for Bina to be represented by subpar aesthetics. And then Martine goes on to say, "but I have uploaded to my mind file more than any other member of my family.” So this is a thing that anyone can go to, what is it called life… net? Kent Bye:LifeNaught Wonder Bright: LifeNaught? Kent Bye:LifeNaught Wonder Bright: LifeNaught. LifeNaught dot com, and you can upload your own mind file if you want. And so then you can just, like, upload images, and, like, statements about your being, and videos and all kinds of things and create your own mind file. So that in the future, when you're able to, like, afford to have your own AI built, you will have this mind file just ready to go. And so Martine has been continuing to work towards that. And yet she isn't willing to actually upload it into a creation currently, which again, she didn't answer why to my own satisfaction, frankly.
[00:36:03.766] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah. And when I start to think about some of the primary significations of this film, I think about, for me, there's a lot of fundamental 9th House themes of the philosophy of consciousness, of life and living. There's a lot of presuppositions about what the nature of reality is, what the nature of consciousness is, and what can you do with it from an engineering perspective. But I think there's a lot of themes around the 7th House of relationship and love, a lot of venusian themes of, like, Bina and Martine, MarBina. The MarBina is a combination of the two souls together, where they're united into one entity. Whether they really want to immortalize their love forever, where they want to capture the love that they have for each other in these kind of mind files and these AI technologies that are immortal. And so the other big themes are the 8th House of death, of trying to transcend death. What's it mean to transcend death? But also the 1st House of identity. What's it mean to preserve and capture someone's identity in their consciousness? And I think a lot of themes of Saturn. Saturn represents a lot of the boundaries, constrictions, tethering to different dimensions of our physical reality, and how can you go beyond that. It's about transcending those boundaries. The transhumanist venture is to go beyond the Saturnian bounds of life, of death, of identity, of all these things that are limitations or barriers in our lives. And so there's kind of a transpersonal Uranus, Neptune, Pluto dimension of all those transpersonal planets that are trying to go beyond the saturnian nature of what it means to be a human.
[00:37:41.504] Kent Bye: So those are the themes that I think, for me, at least, are coming up, a lot a lot of mercurial concepts and ideas, and a lot of air element, of ideas that are being shared, So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts of what you see the primary significations are. Wonder Bright: Yeah, I'm gonna stick with the 8th House of death - also notably the 8th House is the House of shared resources, so it's where you pool your resources with other people, and it opposes the 2nd House of your own individual finances, so to me, because this film really begs some questions about, like, who gets to afford this technology? Like, who is this really for? I can't help but tie in the two financial Houses. And conveniently enough, one of those financial Houses is the 8th House, which is also the 8th House of death, which has historically been a really important house astrologically. And it's really only in the last century in the West where you have these laws against fortune telling in the United States, where you're not allowed to predict death and you're not allowed to think about it, that we have this new confluence of New Age thought, which is where the words transcendence get applied to the 12th House, and to planets like the trans-Saturnian planets. So Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are often, astrologers often use words like transcendence to apply to these planets. And in modern astrology, the 8th House is also often seen as the house of sex, which, I can't even, like, I just can't even, which I just can't hold with. I just don't, like to me that feels like the wrong place.
[00:39:32.678] Kent Bye: Demetra, in her book, goes through some of the delineations of that. Some of it is that Scorpio gets associated with the 8th House, with signs = houses, and then also with Scorpio being connected to the genitals and the groin area. So you kind of have this derivation of, in more modern astrology how you get some significations of sex being associated with the 8th House. But in terms of the traditional lineage, it's all about death and endings and the collective resources as opposed to individual resources of the 2nd House.
[00:40:03.374] Wonder Bright: Right. And I can't help but read into the lack of desire to read death in the natal chart, the culture's lack of desire to, like, really think about death at all. And so we're missing something. And I'm happy that more recently in the last 30 years, astrologers have been bringing back in these traditional significations, because I think there is an opportunity here for us to begin to think about our mortality in a way that is more consistent with reality, frankly. But there's something very evocative to me about the fact that the 8th House is both the house of death and the house of shared resources. And the reason it's the house of shared resources is because the 8th House is the 2nd House from the 7th House. So if the 1st House is self, the 7th House is directly opposite, and that's your partner, your marriage partner, your business partner. And the 2nd House from that, if that was the 1st House of the chart, would be the 8th House's 2nd House, which would be their money. So that's where you get this idea of shared resources because your partner's money is also your money unless the chart indicates otherwise. But that's how we can kind of see this experience of shared resources. And of course, one of the things that happens when people die is they will things, they will their belongings to their loved ones. And so you can see how it ends up being shared resources that when we die, we're also providing for other people. And there's a way in which that speaks to the incredible intimacy that can be created when people are ill or are dying. Kent and I have shared on the podcast in previous episodes that I've recently had a diagnosis of cancer. But what I want to share right now is just the experience of real intimacy and support that I've had from our families since my diagnosis, and the ways in which our time with them has been really enriched by this new awareness of my mortality and the desire to be really connected with one another in this time. And there's a kind of potency that occurs when we're facing our mortality that means that we become present in new ways. And I think that speaks to the intimacy of the 8th House in terms of how it represents death, but shared resources, right? This is what we collectively value rather than just what, like, I might individually value. Where do I become a we, and how am I connected to other people through the things that I own, and that we own together? Like, what will be missing if my life is gone? And that actually allows us an opportunity to be present, and to be present with one another and to share in a way that our normal everyday world, we can kind of forget. We can kind of get lost in, like, future thinking or past thinking, rather than right now might be the only moment we have.
[00:43:28.720] Kent Bye: Yeah, just hearing all those things about the 8th House and this aphorism that's repeated throughout the course of this film, that “death is optional”, and that somehow machines are going to be able to transcend the limitations of death, because of engineering technology, or whether it's stem cells, or whatever it ends up being that they're going to be able to find this elixir of immortality and try to capture people's essence in these AI models. Anyway, lots of provocative thoughts we've been exploring. I guess when you think about Love Machina as a remedial measure, then who would you prescribe this film to?
[00:44:07.884] Wonder Bright: What's the astrological signature for deep ambivalence? Is it Mercury? Hmm. I guess I would prescribe it for people who are interested in the Jupiter Uranus conjunction, which we have one coming up in April of this year in Taurus. And the reason I say the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is because the earliest article that I could find online about BINA48 was published in the New York Times on July 4th, 2010. And they had been working on BINA48 for some time before that, but that's when they released her into the world. And the chart for that date does show a Uranus-Jupiter conjunction. And of course, it’s (now) 14 years later, so here we are on the heels of another one. In addition to that, that chart has Saturn at 28 or 29 degrees Virgo. So Saturn is in Pisces this year, it won't reach 28 Virgo, I don't think until next year. So, Saturn in that chart is also at 28 degrees Virgo, and Saturn currently is in Pisces, which is opposite Virgo. It won't be at 28 degrees Pisces until May of next year in 2025, but what that means is that BINA48 will be going through a Jupiter-Uranus phase return in April, and that next year BINA48 will be going through a Saturn opposition. So, there's an opportunity here to watch, like, one of our first real AI creations become a teenager, and as a facet of their particular teenage years to come into their second Jupiter Uranus phase return. And so there's something very interesting and beguiling to me about that. And I don't know what it will mean, but anyone who's interested in AI and this upcoming Jupiter Uranus conjunction in April, this is a good film to watch and a good story to follow in terms of trying to see where the Jupiter Uranus conjunction, as far as technology goes, might be taking us.
[00:46:32.771] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when I think about what I want to bear witness to in this film, I feel like I want to call out Stephanie Dinkins as someone who's really articulating the voice of skepticism and trying to really interrogate what this all means in the broadest context. So I really, really appreciated hearing her voice and the work that she was doing with BINA48. And I want to bear witness to the Jupiter Uranus unpredictability of technological innovation, because as much as I am resistant, on a philosophical and spiritual, and so many different levels that this film does not resonate with me - on a lot of levels - there’s still a part of me that is holding a little bit of, like, well, maybe there's a part of what I'm saying is wrong. Like, we will be able to crack some of these things, we will be able to figure out consciousness, we will be able to figure out how to transcend death, and what are the implications of that? I feel like our next film, The Eternal You, we're gonna be digging into, what I'd say, is a little bit more balanced take from the filmmakers looking at this idea of digital immortality. I feel like that film has a lot more of these skeptical voices that are pushing back against some of these ideas. I feel like there's a certain amount of AI hype, hashtag AI hype, where you must turn these technologies into a god because they're so powerful. And by not critically analyzing them, it can unconsciously propagate these ideas that there's this godlike power within these technologies. I just feel a little bit cautious and skeptical of that, so it's hard for me to to completely sign off and agree with all the different conclusions of that kind of, transhumanist singularity type of perspective, just because there's so much of that that I feel is toxic, and it's kind of bypassing a lot of the realities of our day. And also this idea that technology can allow us to sort of transcend fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. But I also, as a technology journalist, I can recognize that there are maybe things that are completely shocking or surprising or things that challenge my own ideas. And so I watch this film in a way that I have a part of my mind that holds a possibility that what Martine Rothblatt says is correct, even though I see (it) as extremely problematic and a lot of things that I completely disagree with as of right now.
[00:48:54.062] Wonder Bright: That's really well put. Yeah. I remember I had a dream years and years ago where a young child was trying to help me solve a problem, and I was getting increasingly frustrated because I kept trying to solve the problem the same way. And finally at some point in the dream she just looked at me, and I remember she put her hand on mine, and she said, “sometimes you want to be wrong.” And I want to bear witness to the extreme optimism that the filmmakers captured, partly because I agree, you’re right. I think that's how they, themselves, experience it. And that's why Martine Rothblatt trusted them and allowed them to come in and film her, because she's actually really quite a private person. You can't find anything more than the year of her birth, or the year of her wife Bina's birth online. Their birthdays are not published. That's unusual in today's culture for someone who's as well known as these two are. And she has the resources to make sure that their privacy is respected. So for her to allow these filmmakers in, she trusted them because they were able to convince her that they shared her optimistic vision of what might be so. And I completely disagree with her conclusions, it sparks real fear in me. And boy, would I like to be wrong about that.
[00:50:28.232] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, that's all that we have for today. And I just want to thank you for listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do, spread the word, and tell your friends, and consider signing up on the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
