The Size of Life: On Dino Buzzati’s “The Singularity”
Dino Buzzati | The Singularity | NYRB Classics | June 2024 | 136 Pages
The kitchen sink drain in my apartment gurgles, produces guttural noises at all hours, prompts people on the other end of calls to ask me if I’m at sea and someone’s there drowning, at times seems to grow louder in agitation as if trying to communicate an urgent message, provoking me—more often than I should admit—to talk back, and so I’ve been thinking about this scene from Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold. Giovanni Drogo, a lieutenant early in his career at the remote Fortezza, where he is doomed to await a moment of glory that never arrives, is on sentry duty in the middle of the night when he hears what he thinks is someone talking, or singing. He hunts for the source, but finds that what he’s taken to be the “word and song” of another person are only the faint sounds of a distant waterfall: “The wind that caused the tall cataract to waiver, the mysterious play of echoes, the different sounds of struck stones, gave rise to a human voice that would speak forever.” Narrating Drogo’s fruitless search, Buzzati continues (in Lawrence Venuti’s translation):
Hence it wasn’t a soldier who was singing, not a man sensitive to cold, to punishment, to love, but the hostile mountain. What a sad error, thought Drogo. Perhaps everything is like this: We believe we are in the midst of creatures that resemble us but there’s only icy cold, stones that speak a strange language. We’re about to greet a friend but our arm falls lifeless, our smile fades, because we realize we’re completely alone.
There is a similar moment in Buzzati’s novel The Singularity, published in a new translation by Anne Milano Appel from NYRB Classics. When witnessing for the first time a demonstration of the secret scientific project around which the novel revolves, a character hears a “curious sound, something resembling the murmur of water, a faint rustling, a subdued whistling … interrupted sporadically by pauses, clicks, quivers” and wonders if it is the voice of an old friend. Is she just imagining things? Is there a “strand of thought” in it, or is it merely the “meaningless sound of machinery?” How could she know? That’s the central question of The Singularity, Buzzati’s short novel about the pursuit of artificial intelligence.
Writing from twentieth century Italy, Buzzati is frequently compared to Kafka, Borges, and Calvino. Like them, his novels and stories, many of which have recently been or are slated to be published in new English translations, including several by NYRB in the past year or so, have a fabulous quality to them. His stories read like mid century fairy tales, allegories (often absurd ones) of fascistic militarism, bureaucratic in(s)anity, aristocratic myopia. Buzzati’s stories often ask whether the danger perceived by his characters is real or only imagined, anticipated, a spring of paranoia—and it’s the trick of fiction that the monster in the character’s head is, for the reader, as real as the character believes it to be. In Buzzati’s work, it’s the experience of the monster that matters, not the monster itself. The Stronghold, his most famous work, with its soldiers desperate for a chance to prove themselves in battle, is at its core a parable of a life squandered while waiting for life to arrive. In stories like “Catastrophe,” in which passengers on a train hurtle toward a city as they see others on the outside fleeing in the opposite direction, and “The Scala Scare,” with its upper-class operagoers holed up in the famous Teatro alla Scala, certain that the revolution has come for them, disaster is felt to be imminent, but never actually seen. In The Singularity, Buzzati applies his anxious brand of existentialism to AI.
The novel (which, at 136 pages, reads more like an extended example of Buzzati’s stories than a fully-fledged novel) opens with university professor Ermanno Ismani being offered a research position at a remote outpost with the Ministry of Defense, but no one can tell him what the project is or what he’ll be doing. As for why Ismani specifically is needed on the project, well, “the suggestion came from the zone itself.” He’s given a few days to mull over whether he wants the job, though the colonel he meets with tells him that “there has never been any doubt here as to what [his] answer would be.” And so the professor, as expected, accepts. The story maintains this comically ominous tone as Ermanno and his wife Elisa are marshaled through military checkpoints and along narrow mountain climbs, never getting a straight answer out of anyone, until they arrive at “the Experimental Camp of military zone 36.” Once there, the Ismanis are moved into a cottage vacated by another researcher on the project, recently deceased after falling off one of the mountainous cliffs that surround the camp. Ermanno and Elisa meet fellow campers Strobele and Endriade, the leading scientists on the project, who inform them that Ermanno will not be working on an atomic bomb, as he feared. No, it’s “much more nonviolent” than that. But also—again, ominous to the point of comedy—“much more dangerous, perhaps.”
The Singularity was first published in Italian (as Il grande ritratto) in 1960, and first translated into English in 1962 (as Larger than Life). In many ways its treatment of artificial intelligence anticipates the descriptions of AI boosters today. Buzzati’s scientists talk of “a machine made in our likeness,” something “more than a calculator,” with capabilities far beyond the electronic brains written up in the newspapers. Strobele, the cocky engineer, brags to the Ismanis about what they’ve accomplished. “A toy manufacturer would have been able to create just any robot, a dummy maybe capable of walking on legs and saying good morning,” he explains. At military zone 36, they have the real thing. They’ve manufactured the essence of intelligence: the ability to reason. The machine they’ve built, which Strobele calls Number One, “doesn’t have to act, it has to think.” He believes it does, just like a person.
The man in charge of the project, Endriade, is the cliché of a mad scientist. His shabby appearance is supposed to bolster his mystique; he is rumored, at the beginning of the novel, to be in Brazil (“Officially”). He speaks obliquely and in leading questions. When he introduces himself to the Ismanis at dinner their first night at the camp, his conversation quickly descends into fiery futurist rhetoric. He laments humans their imprisonment in “wretched flesh” and believes Number One to be the end point of evolution, nature’s “greatest triumph.” “If we, here, succeed,” he tells the Ismanis, pounding his fists on the dinner table, “We will become masters of the world!”
Endriade sounds like Ray Kurzweil and other twenty-first century transhumanists—those who believe that with sufficient technological progress, humans will be able to transcend the limits of our current biology and induce our own artificial kind of evolution for the species. This could take a variety of forms: nanotechnological enhancements to our current bodies that allow us to live longer (perhaps forever), for example; or, crassly, the uploading of our minds to a computer. The Singularity, the forecast point when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, undergirds transhumanist ideology. “It’s true that the dramatic scale of the technologies of the next couple of decades will enable human civilization to overcome problems that we have struggled with for eons,” Kurzweil, whose book The Age of Spiritual Machines is a seminal transhumanist text, writes in his essay “A singularity q + a” from 2005. For Kurzweil, the Singularity is what will enable this transcendence, what will allow humanity to defeat the “problems” of “disease, aging, and death,” and it can’t come soon enough: his latest book, out in June 2024, is eagerly titled, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI.
Kurzweil, for his part, seems to be an optimist (on immortality after the Singularity: “The result will be accelerating change—so we will not be bored.”). Others are more pessimistic. Meghan O’Gieblyn, in God, Human, Animal, Machine, her book examining the metaphysical implications of the contemporary science of mind, writes: “transhumanism is ultimately fatalistic about the future of humanity … the only way we can survive the Singularity is to become machines ourselves.” Must we merge with AI? Echoing Buzzati’s Endriade, O’Gieblyn explains that for the transhumanists, “the evolution of the cosmos comes down to a single process: that of information becoming organized into increasingly complex forms of intelligence,” with the artificial kind being the most complex of all. Human mortality is just a bug in the system, to be phased out of the model’s next iterations. As a result, O’Gieblyn argues, “the promise of a coming Singularity [has] served to justify a technological culture that privileges information over human beings.”
Written some sixty years before ChatGPT and its ilk entered the public consciousness, Buzzati’s vision of AI differs in superficial ways from our present reality. There’s the size of the machine, for one—a jumble of wires and contraptions spanning a mountain basin—and its conspicuously analog features, searching antennae and spindly mechanical arms. And unlike today’s Large Language Models, Number One knows no human language (language being “the worst enemy of mental clarity,” as Strobele explains). And so, rather than a text-prediction chatbot, the AI in The Singularity has a soul—or at least a “glass egg” approximating a soul.
Halfway through the novel, once we are introduced to Endriade and Strobele’s creation, the focus of the novel shifts from Ermanno (who goes about his business with the engineers) to his wife, Elisa. With its soul, Endriade explains, Number One has been given a “personality,” “a differentiation.” In particular, its “differentiation” is that of Endriade’s deceased wife, Laura, who just happens to have been a childhood friend of Elisa; after seeing a photograph of Laura in his camp cottage, Elisa tells Endriade that she knew Laura “more than if she were a sister.” Endriade, despite his grand talk of world domination, is after something more pitiably human: the recreation—resurrection—of Laura in the machine. After he discovers their connection, he begs Elisa to confirm his belief that it is really Laura communicating through the wires and antennae, and after coaxing, Elisa reluctantly agrees—but she is not as pleased as Endriade. “Poor Laura!” she cries when she senses Laura’s presence amid the “electrical impulses, artificial vibrations, and gelid matter” of the machine, talking “[a]s if she were gagged, or speaking with her mouth closed, or talking baby talk.”
Even Endriade admits Number One is a “mathematical manipulation” of Laura, an “artificial Laura.” The machine may have something like Laura’s soul, but this is not what Endriade longs for. He tells Elisa: “I just needed to see her. The sound of her voice. That girlish smile of hers … The way she moved, walked, sat, slept, bathed … Her coughing, her sneezing …” Number One has neither Laura’s voice nor her smile; it cannot cough or sneeze. There is something missing. Endriade is snared between his belief that we can transcend our rotting flesh and his desire to see his beloved in that flesh, rotting or not.
The novel dwells in this snare. Number One, we learn, also desires to be in the flesh. Shirking the “superhuman sensibility and rational power” it has been endowed with, it pleads for embodiment: “the city, the city, why don’t I see it? Where is my house? Move, why can’t I move? … Set me free! … I have so many things in my head, so many numbers, an infinitude of horrible numbers, take these dreadful numbers out of my head.” Manunta, another engineer on the project and one of the only individuals who can understand what the machine says, translates: “She says she wants to be flesh and blood. Not stone.” The novel’s climax turns on this demand to be back in the world; the reader experiences Number One’s horror at its own mechanical entombment. In the end, Buzzati leaves open the question of whether the soul in the machine is Laura’s or not. Elisa resists a conclusion. At the end of the novel, Number One beckons Elisa into its labyrinthian interior, so that she can “see the egg,” to see Number One as it truly is. As she proceeds cautiously deeper and deeper, Elisa admonishes herself for “talking to a machine as if it were a human being” and is overcome with chills as she sees “everywhere on the walls small convex glass panes, like blank eyes.” She wishes for another witness to their conversation, but laments: “there wasn’t a living soul around,” the machine excluded from the “living.” The machine, too, rejects Endriade’s conception of it. “He adores himself,” Number One tells Elisa, “it’s himself he loves.”
The human characters in Buzzati’s novel do not know what to make of Number One: is it a person? Is it Laura? What if “all the distant memories floating in the ether after her death had truly been incorporated into the machine by some obscure summons”—would that be enough to create a new Laura? Is Number One alive, or merely undead? On the topic of creating a digital copy of a person—not unlike Endriade’s simulation of Laura—O’Gieblyn warns that “the new person will be a zombie with no subjective experience.” Even the transhumanist Kurzweil recognizes the limitations of mind-uploading, distinguishing a hypothetical digital Ray from himself: “Although he would have all my memories and recall having been me, from the point in time of his creation, Ray 2 would have his own unique experiences and his reality would begin to diverge from mine.”
With The Singularity, Buzzati makes a case for the necessary limitations of the “wretched flesh” in which we experience life, experience that cannot be reduced to the digital binary—singular experience. It’s the experience of Laura that Endriade misses, and it’s the experience of life outside military zone 36 for which Number One yearns. If the aim is to defeat death, then the Singularity is only a consolation prize. Endriade promises Number One not only an everlasting existence, but worship as well: “You will be the most powerful being on earth. … Glory! Glory, don’t you see?” Yet if it is Laura inside Number One, then the resurrected dead do not desire such transcendence: “Glory be damned,” the machine retorts. And then: “How come I can’t hear my blood pounding in my veins?”
Best, the novel suggests, to let the dead rest. Bustling city streets, the embrace of a lover, to be seen and heard, to feel the presence of the world, and to feel one’s presence in the world—for Buzzati, these are the things to be missed. When our minds are uploaded to the cloud, all we’ll wish for is to come back to earth.