Inside a Fusion Startup’s Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony
Robots! Huge capacitors! A pianist-programmer of impossible skill! One of Silicon Valley’s formative figures takes the stage at a wild event.
by JARON LANIER
ONCE IN A while, Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley. It happened on August 8, 2024, at the opening ceremony for a nuclear fusion energy startup. The events of that day were so astonishing I wish I could blurt them out to you in an instant, like a hologram, but you will need to be patient, as the linear nature of language allows me to unveil only one piece at a time.
I had been sensing a malaise for a year or two, a feeling that tech had lost its flavor. The big AI leap was part of it. It wasn’t just the question of, “If AI could do everything, what would people be for?” (Deceptive question, since AI is made of people. Your data, remember?) More than that, the focus on AI seemed to change the way people thought about reality. A lot of my friends were talking about using language models to calculate the best future. Life was now a problem to be solved.
The way out of this trap, I think, is for people to become smaller. To get back in touch with the edge of mystery. This isn’t a conclusion I can argue for using language, but once in a while, if we’re lucky, it’s a thing that can be experienced.
So: An audience composed of venture capitalists, US military and intelligence agency officials, physicists, and San Francisco artists have been invited to a secret event. They enter through an imposing vault door to take their places in rows of seats that feel tiny in the shadows of a vast space. Behind them is a sea of refrigerator-sized capacitors. In front is a stage set that is a little hard to visually interpret. It is white and heavenly, high tech, large, glowing.