The Hills Are Alive (with the Sound of Screaming)
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‘I sit at my desk at two a.m., and I feel like reality is staring at me, screaming at me.
‘Literally, screaming at me. Trying to tell me something if I could just listen hard enough.
‘That’s how I feel every day.’
– Demis Hassabis, cited in The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby
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Demis Hassabis is a Nobel Prize–winning pioneer in artificial intelligence, the driving force behind AI laboratory Google DeepMind and a good bet to be the major thinker in the room if a smarter-than-human AI was to be born. However sceptical we should be about the possibility of a ‘singularity’-type event – in which recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence (ASI) accelerates to levels massively beyond human comprehension, leaving us as helplessly under its control as a lab rat lost in a maze – disinterested experts tend to concede that this is, at least, plausible. And, on the outside chance that it did happen, if humanity was lab-ratted, then the personality of our new ASI overlord would almost certainly have been shaped at least in part by Hassabis. As a potential parental influence on an incipient god, he is worth paying attention to. And so we have to ask: why does Hassabis feel that reality is screaming?
I have wrestled with that question for weeks. The more I’ve considered it, the more it seems that the answer has everything to do with artificial intelligence, with the way that late-capitalist computation works within our societal moment. That is, with the way that technology, society and the nonhuman world are held in a specific but ever-changing relation by a technosocial system. In truth, Hassabis is sensing a scream that has sounded for as long as humans have used tools, and it is into this history we need to look to understand Hassabis, the scream and AI itself.
Reality’s first great scream in literature is, in a sense, the very edge of literature itself. In the ancient Mesopotamian epic, the hero Gilgamesh is introduced in the poem’s first line as ‘He who saw the deep’. This is Gilgamesh’s accreditation for the position of hero. ‘The deep’ is, in part, the underworld, but it is also deep time: Gilgamesh’s quest leads him to the only survivor of the great flood – the template for Noah, Uta-napishti – from whom he learns what took place in antediluvian times, pulling back what is for so many cultures the curtain shrouding prehistoric humanity.
When humankind has taken a wrong turn – we are exacting too high a toll on the land, artifice is supplanting nature – the world screams out as if in pain.
The deluge in Gilgamesh is understood as the roaring and screaming of the gods. This passage is from Sophus Helle’s translation of tablet XI:
At the first flood of daylight,
a black cloud rose on the horizon.
Adad the Storm God was roaring inside it,
[…]
The goddess wailed like a woman giving birth,
the sweet-voiced Belet-ili screamed:
[…]
‘I declared a war to destroy the human people,
but I am their mother—the people were mine!
Now like fish they fill the sea.’
Why did Belet-ili declare war, why did the earth rise up? Because humankind had become too populous, too obtrusive; our racket and hubbub had begun to keep the gods awake. As another Mesopotamian epic puts it, ‘The land extended and the people multiplied. / The land was bellowing like a bull.’ Our cunning multiplications – the artifices our intelligence facilitated – cuneiform script, city walls, irrigation – were sliding the natural out of true, off balance. The human was straying beyond its proper bounds.
The foundational meaning of the scream of reality, then, is ecological. When humankind intuits that we have taken a wrong turn – that we are exacting too high a toll on the land, that artifice is supplanting nature – then the world roars and bellows and screams out as if in pain, and the scream is destroying, cleansing. When Uta-napishti is told of the coming flood, he is warned ‘leave wealth, look for life, / forget your goods, save yourself!’ The human is given a choice between either clinging to wealth, possessions, ownership, manufacture, dominion, or forsaking these things for survival. One reading of Gilgamesh – and the flood myth that precedes and underlies the biblical account – understands the earth as screaming out against its subjection to extractive human dominion. The scream’s purpose is to return us to the undifferentiation, the inhuman nullity of matter: ‘Brothers looked in vain for each other; / men all looked the same in the slaughter.’ Later, Belet-ili screams that ‘All the past has turned to clay’, and that humans fill the sea ‘like fish’. The scream would strip us of our technologies of survival and distinction, and transform us back to the clay and beasts from which we had temporarily arisen.
The idea that an unearthly scream mediates the borderline between life and death – being and nonbeing, the human and nonhuman – circulates in cultural forms as various as the ‘primal scream’, the banshee myth, the ‘scream queen’ horror subgenre (including the slasher franchise Scream), as well as the endless algal bloom of green clichés about the earth screaming or crying out in response to pollution and ecocide.
This is the rule: if you prevent something from speaking, then it will begin to scream.
This is a borderline that is, by definition, beyond words, and in this context the scream makes sense. A scream is what happens to vocality when language is unavailable, insufficient, when it runs out or falters. The beginning of the scream marks the far borderline of the sayable, just as the flood marks the farthest point of the humanly knowable. The scream is the expression of the infant, and ‘infant’ means, etymologically, in–fans, ‘not speaking’. This holds at every level of social analysis. The economist Dan Davies notes that contemporary Western democracies have a remarkably narrow channel for the communication of public opinion to the government, and surmises that the ‘only kind of communication that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream’.
This is the rule: if you prevent something from speaking, then it will begin to scream.
In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh mounts a compelling argument that Western modernity – imperialist and colonial, scientific, commercial, limited by Enlightenment rationality – creates a situation whereby matter and the nonhuman are muted, pushed out of language, flattened out. He considers the nutmeg:
The modern gaze sees only one of the nutmeg’s two hemispheres: that part of it which is Myristica fragrans, a subject of science and commerce. The other half eludes it because it will only manifest itself in songs and stories. And in today’s stories and songs there is no place for the nutmeg; it is merely an inert object, a planet that contains no intrinsic meaning, and no properties other than those that make it a subject of science and commerce.
It wasn’t just the nutmeg:
[T]he trees, volcanoes, and landscapes […] had no meaning except as resources that could be harnessed to generate profit. This outlook reflected a metaphysic that was then [in the 1600s] emerging in Europe, in which matter was seen as ‘brute’ and ‘stupid’ and hence deserving of conquest ‘with the most destructive of technologies with nothing but profit and material wealth as ends.’
Ghosh argues that this metaphysic was ‘a radically new way of envisioning the Earth’ as, citing Julie Hochstrasser, ‘a vast machine made of inert particles in ceaseless motion’. This was built on the logic of colonialism: ‘It was the rendering of humans into mute resources that enabled the metaphysical leap whereby the Earth and everything in it could also be reduced to inertness.’ The Enlightenment and imperialist project of scientificising the world involves muting first humans, and then, by extension, matter itself.
What the surfacing of this scream in Gilgamesh helps us to realise is that regimes of ecocidal and extractive dominion over the nonhuman were not invented clean in seventeenth-century Europe, but are rather best understood as a sudden and dramatic intensification of a pattern that began long before, with what Timothy Morton has called ‘the agrilogistical episteme’, the foundations of agriculture and civilisation as we know it.
It should be clear at this stage how the analogy works in relation to superhuman AI, with all its existential risk, its promise of a new technosocial world order, the spiralling water demand of its intricately irrigated data centres. The scream marks the intensification of humanity’s project of bending the world to our will, of muting its own intrinsic expressivity and making it speak to us, if it speaks at all, with our own voice.
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In her essay on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Anne Carson writes about the challenge of translating an untranslatable scream that issues from the prophet Cassandra. Carson decides to leave the exclamation untranslated: ‘OTOTOI POPOI DA’. These noises are not a word, Carson signals: they are a sound, squeezed beyond the margins of the sayable by an unimaginable pressure and grief, Cassandra’s unendurable prophecy. (Cassandra had been enslaved during the sack of Troy. In Ancient Greece, slaves were not considered fully human: one of their terms for a slave was andrapodon, ‘man-footed creature’. But she was also channelling the prophecy of the gods and was, therefore, simultaneously less-than and more-than human.)
This wordless scream, for Carson, represents the catastrophe, the moment at which human meaning-making shatters against the indifference of the universe. In this moment, Cassandra becomes a symbol of the unbearable brightness of the superreal: ‘The longer you look at her the more fiercely you have to struggle to see her light which seems to sink its beam into you at a hotter and hotter frequency. Eventually you notice that something stinks. It is the gelatin of your own eyeball’: what you are looking at is so bright that your eyes are burning, melting. I believe Carson is alluding to what Alice Oswald refers to as enargeia, which, in Oswald’s words, ‘means something like “bright unbearable reality”. It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.’
The human, Cassandra makes clear, cannot survive an encounter with the divine. But perhaps an infinity machine could?
From this perspective, Cassandra’s scream signifies the momentary contact with the obliterating excess of the more-than-human. Carson says the smell of your own melting eyeballs ‘is the smell of matter experiencing its own future’. The smell of matter becoming conscious of itself not in disguise – as thought, as thinking – but as it really is in all its bare, unconcealed being.
The scream of the Real, then, doesn’t emerge as a result of human misdeed or wrong-relation to the land. Instead, it’s intrinsic to the metaphysical condition of the human. The scream is what occurs when an infinite signal is forced through a finite channel; the distorted shriek of the mortal confronted by the divine, the eternal. ‘The only kind of communication that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream.’
The reason Hassabis’s biographer chose The Infinity Machine for the title of his book is because of the dream that AI tech might solve this problem; that matter, in all its bright enargeia-soaked infinity might somehow be made to apprehend itself, and to feed the fruits of such a confrontation back to us in a human-palatable way. The human, Cassandra makes clear, cannot survive an encounter with the divine. But perhaps an infinity machine could?
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Cassandra’s scream was still reverberating in the late nineteenth century, when George Eliot picked up the signal. There’s a famous passage in Middlemarch that touches on it:
[W]e do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
That roar which lies on the other side of silence. This is more than an accident of phrasing: such a scream or roar is alluded to throughout Eliot’s work. It is there in The Lifted Veil, in which Latimer’s Cassandra-like clairvoyance ‘mak[es] audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness’, and where it does indeed prove fatal. It’s there too in Daniel Deronda, where the sum total of human feeling emerges as ‘the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.’ That cry, from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, is ten lines before Prometheus descends into wordlessness with exactly the same OTOTOI of Cassandra.
If Middlemarch has a single pivotal moment, this silent killing roar might be it. Dorothea is realising that she cannot be happy with Casaubon – walking monument to the vanities of mere intellect – and that instead she needs feeling, human warmth, love. She married Casaubon because of his towering scholarly project, The Key to All Mythologies (by such works, in Anne Carson’s words, ‘The templates are set […] Reality is captured.’). He represented to her the promise of the triumph of the human mind, the human will, that our species could come to know the world completely, to capture reality by mind alone. And this passage is the moment in the novel where that ideal begins to crack. ‘It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change,’ but ‘in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act […] was struggling forth into clearness’.
What is struggling forth into clearness for Dorothea is that human cognitive effort is not sufficient to the world. Casaubon’s relentless march of stolid work, pushing emotion aside in order to resolutely know all that can be known, is a grievous error, a hubristic failure to recognise that reality remains intractable to intelligence alone. But it is social; its origin is in the short-sightedness of individual people and their relation. Eliot’s genius is to map this onto the metaphysical insight that a genuine glimpse of all-knowingness would mean stepping into that fatal roar of everything on the other side of silence. We must, as the Mesopotamians knew, stay in our lane, remain within the portion allotted for the human; but our lane consists of an epistemic as well as an ecological humility. The scream is simultaneously a social and an existential question.
Hassabis wants more intelligence, whereas Eliot feels that the wadding of stupidity might be all that keeps us alive.
Eliot’s modification to the idea of the cry of the Real is that the scream emerges not so much from brightness or intensity as from scale, volume. This makes sense for a translator of Spinoza’s Ethics, as Eliot was: God is simply everything, is nature, is the all. The gods don’t kill by being overwhelmingly bright, like in Ancient Greece; God is obliterating because of sheer scale. Spinoza’s formulation Deus sive Natura – ‘God or nature’ – would also make sense of the highly ecological religiosity of the Mesopotamians, for whom the gods act as a kind of homeostatic control mechanism, intervening precisely when humans move beyond the bounds of sustainable, respectful balance with the natural world.
Like Ghosh, Eliot intuits a link between the muted suffering of humans and the unendurable mutedness of matter itself. Unlike Ghosh, Eliot thinks that matter’s scream would be fatal regardless of our relationship to it. Like Hassabis, Eliot hears the scream on the other side of silence. Hassabis wants more intelligence, though, whereas Eliot feels that the wadding of stupidity might be all that keeps us alive. For Eliot, as for Aeschylus, Carson and Oswald, the scream of the Real is – whether by virtue of volume, intensity or scale – intrinsically destructive to the frail human. The formal implication of Eliot’s deployment of the idea is that both the Gilgameshian-Ghoshian scream (ecological) and the Carsonian Aeschylean scream (existential) are, in fact, complexly related, by some intrinsically technical component of the human.
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In truth, this essay has begun to feel like my Key to All Mythologies. The vocabulary – Gilgameshian-Ghoshian? – feels portentous, otherworldly. I have begun calling the scream, in my head – initially as a joke but increasingly reflexively – the Realenschrei, an invented faux–German philosophical portmanteau. And everywhere I look I see the Realenschrei. Examples of it have proliferated under my fingertips for weeks. I visit a gallery and learn that Edvard Munch’s painting commonly known as The Scream was also exhibited under the name The Scream of Nature, a plaque telling me that his account of its conception was to the sense of ‘an infinite scream passing through nature’. In the next room is one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, which Carson wrote about in the same essay as Cassandra, and which John Berger read as vacillating on the edge of a scream emanating from either social alienation or existential angst.
I come down with a cold and my friend Jemima recommends Arthur Conan Doyle for some light reading; the first story I find is the weird Gaia Hypothesis–pre-empt in 1928’s ‘When the World Screamed’, in which a scientist discovers the Earth is literally a living creature and pricks it to hear its scream, which is then explicitly figured as the unspeakable – ‘Who is there of all the hundreds who have attempted it who has ever yet described adequately that terrible cry?’
The connections start to feel like they are making themselves. My partner reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s story ‘In the Village’, which opens: ‘A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies, skies that travellers compare to those of Switzerland’. The next day I am scanning Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata for work, in which the protagonist finds himself in the very heart of neutral Switzerland and feels that even there ‘everything is roaring at me and asking me to change the way I think about things, and this is going to kill me.’ I take a walk to clear my head, and an old Spotify playlist shuffles up three consecutive tracks – Odetta’s ‘Water Boy’, Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ and Deftones’ ‘Bored’ – each defined by the unmistakable disintegrating vocality of the Realenschrei.
By this point I am losing my ability to tell whether all of this is some apopheniac response to late-modernity’s informational megatonnage – exactly what underwrites and produces AI tech – or whether reality is trying to tell me something, if I could just listen hard enough.
But maybe the proliferation of examples just demonstrates that the scream is everywhere, and has persisted for thousands of years, shifting in tonality and significance over time. Its character has tended to be conditioned by each historical period’s impression of the way their own technological paradigm has unsettled or unbalanced the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, between people and the earth – and whether that understanding is of an ecological or metaphysical trespass, or both. If for the Mesopotamians it was agriculture and city building that moved humanity out of our place, and for the Greeks it was a hubristic human trespass against the divine order, then for Eliot it was the Industrial Revolution, the encroaching train line and the relentless omnivorousness of Scientism and its Enlightenment.
Humankind has become complacent, we have forgotten the power of the great teacher and we have begun to expect it to do our bidding.
During the twentieth century, this feeling of imbalance was conditioned by the event of nuclear power and the splitting of the atom. One of my favourite analogies in all of literature was published in 2011, in a fairly obscure poem called ‘Flowers and Birds of the Four Seasons…’ by the American poet (and Jungian analyst) John Peck. It’s a poem about the Chernobyl disaster, and it sets the scene like this:
And through
the sleep of one witness a clod
at terrible
velocity passed her. Screamed.
The word ‘clod’ – as in ‘clod of earth’ – is significantly the implication of the stupid brutishness which the poem reminds us, in an echo of Ghosh, is a dangerous way to dismiss matter. Perhaps more interesting for our purposes is the way that ‘Screamed.’ sits there, a sentence to itself. It is bare, bald, exposed, without the support of a syntactic structure or grammatical wadding, like an ‘OTOTOI’. This allows the possibility either that it is the clod – nature – that is screaming, or the human witness. That is, it operates exactly like the Munch painting, where the scream of the inhuman surfaces within the human, like the metastasising radiogenic tumour.
The poem ends like this:
Our race
is that
woman of means with middling
talent, the nice but pushy pupil,
who came to
aging Liszt – he, reduced
to taking such people.
This time she was
halting in the runs, slowly repeating.
He stood at gaze
gripping his arm,
then slammed
both fists down. Enough! Don’t you
know who I am?
It’s an astonishing metaphor. The era-defining radioactive explosion at Chernobyl is reimagined as the master musician losing his temper with the inept pupil, screaming in her face: Enough! Humankind has become complacent, we have forgotten the power of the great teacher – the world, the earth, matter – and we have begun to expect it to do our bidding. We do not know what it is: we, in the words of the poem, ‘call it matter, dubbing it / stuff’. We are taken back to Anne Carson’s words: ‘The templates are set. Adam long ago named all the creatures. Reality is captured.’ The actual being of matter is suppressed, concreted over, suspended.
This attitude towards matter – our probing into it, bullying it at its core, committing the invasive surgery of fission, dubbing it ‘stuff’, ‘clod’, capturing it in templates and names – was always going to constrict its channels of meaningful communication to such an extent that the only expressive possibility remaining was the Realenschrei of rebuke: Enough!
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Peck is by no means the only writer to pick up on nuclear power as a metaphor for the surpassing power of matter.
‘From all the hills came screams.’ Annie Dillard was watching a total eclipse on the February 26 1979, and nothing had prepared her for the spiritual immensity of the moment, the profound sense of ecological dislocation and wrongness that came with the erasure of the sun, that pivotal element of the world and supreme symbolic entity:
Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself. If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.
In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil. Its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.
The deeps Dillard mentions are the same deeps that Gilgamesh, part god, was able to see. In fact, the total eclipse takes Dillard back to the Gilgameshian world: ‘The grass at our feet was wild barley. It was the wild einkorn wheat which grew on the hilly flanks of the Zagros Mountains, above the Euphrates valley, above the valley of the river we called River. We harvested the grass with stone sickles, I remember.’
This makes sense. Once again, the same elements are in play: imbalance, the human revealed as contingent, our significance resting on something deeper, which, although we might temporarily paper it over with our meanings and symbols and knowledge, is ultimately so far beyond communication that only a scream could vocalise it. ‘It obliterated meaning itself,’ like the OTOTOI of Cassandra or Prometheus. A scale far beyond the human is intimated. Infinity, eternity. ‘It had nothing to do with anything,’ Dillard repeats, dazed. The hills scream; our very hearts within us – those beating bundles of alien matter that sustain everything we think we are – screech; but we ourselves fall silent.
The ‘unified field’ that Dillard mentions is important for the poet Jorie Graham, who received a Pulitzer for her book The Dream of the Unified Field. The title simultaneously marks a yearning for a unity between the human and the material world while also ironising the hope of achieving this through scientific knowledge, and the attempt in physics to do so by completing what is known as ‘unified field theory’. The human sense making apparatus might ‘capture’ reality – or, in Graham’s word, ‘colonise’ it – but it doesn’t sponsor meaningful communication, doesn’t make space for reality’s message.
Here is a couplet from Graham’s poem ‘Manifest Destiny’, collected in The Dream of the Unified Field:
How can the scream rise up out of its grave of matter?
How can the light drop down out of its grave of thought?
This colossal-feeling couplet operates in context on many levels, but one of them is regarding the way that the scream arises from matter precisely when the matter is radically separated off from thought, entombed apart. The communicative channel is closed off, and so a scream is all that is left.
The project of Silicon Valley AI is the final consummation of our age-old habit of speaking for – speaking over – the actual.
One thing Graham is doing here is reframing the Cartesian anxiety: how can matter and thought come into contact? How can the mental stuff of mind touch the physical stuff of world? The two seem as separate as bodies buried in different graves. And yet they do touch: we do know the world.
Clearly, though, for Graham, the struggle towards that moment of contact is not simple or painless. The constraints through which we squeeze in the attempt generates the scream of matter, the bright obliterating charred-eyeball enargeia of the Spinozan god-stuff come not veiled by the human cliché of language – ‘Do you think these words are still enough?’ – but as itself.
But here also the scream is not purely metaphysical. These lines come in the middle of a poem called ‘Manifest Destiny’, the phrase referring to the doctrine that American settlers had a clear and undeniable right to dispossess the Native Americans of their land, to colonise, claim, subjugate the landscape and, if necessary, genocidally cleanse the people living there. Think back to Ghosh: the conceptual machine for the muting and brutalising of humans is the same machine that mutes and brutalises stuff, matter, the nonhuman.
For Graham, the way we conceive of the human mind in its relationship with the nonhuman world of matter will always be the foundation of the way we think about the relationships between humans. She finds a way to identify the great scream of the Real with the much more direct and intimate screams of the soldiers on the battlefield fighting, like all soldiers, for somebody else’s grand vision of how the world should be.
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Ursula Le Guin wrote that ‘technology is the active human interface with the material world.’ It is at moments in which technological change is rewiring the relationship between the human and the material – moments that mark an intensification pattern for humanity’s feeling of ascendency over the nonhuman, in terms of control but also of thinking, knowledge – that the channels of communication from the material world are constricted, and at which the destroying scream becomes perceptible. Neither the power nor the scream needs to be actual: it is an emanation of our anxieties about the status of ultimate control we have accorded to ourselves. It is the old familiar paranoia of the dictator. The dictator: one who speaks.
Which, of course, is why Hassabis can hear the scream. The project of Silicon Valley AI is the final consummation of our age-old habit of speaking for – speaking over – the actual. Its programme is the disarticulation of the world into tokens, and then the papering back of the reconstituted token speech over everything, every surface coated and covered by AI text like a balloon in papier-mâché. It is the furthest possible bound of what Anne Carson addressed in her essay on Cassandra: ‘what else is one’s own language but a gigantic cacophonous cliché? Nothing has not been said before. The templates are set. Adam long ago named all the creatures. Reality is captured.’
The agents of technocapital, into whose ranks Hassabis has been conscripted, imagine themselves as the new saviours of humanity, the new bringers of fire. Each imagines himself a little postmodern Prometheus. But Prometheus was punished for his actions – OTOTOI! – and we shouldn’t wait until we are rebuked by the Enough! of some AI Chernobyl before we consider the significance of the scream we intuit on the other side of silence.
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Joey Connolly is a poet, essayist and critic from Sheffield. His first collection of poems Long Pass was published by Carcanet in 2017, and was followed by The Recycling (a Telegraph poetry book of the year) in May 2023. He currently lives in Belfast.
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