Artificial Time & Víkingur Time
Real consciousness is not fetched and represented. It flourishes as it vanishes.
Last week I watched a supremely skilled man travel in time while playing the piano for 80 uninterrupted minutes. Then I was floored by an incidental comment he made. Unexpectedly, he challenged much popular thinking about Artificial Intelligence.
The man was Iceland’s Víkingur Ólafsson, performing a solo concert as the 2025-26 Artist In Residence at Berkeley’s Cal Performances. He played what he calls “Opus 109,” a project which consists of a Bach prelude, a Beethoven sonata, a Bach partita, a Schubert sonata, and the final Beethoven sonata (the titular opus.) He played it without a break between movements, or the standard applause for individual pieces. This new work illuminates a creative interaction spanning more than a century. He plays it entirely from memory.
I should state here that I am a musical idiot, and know little about the history of music or the technical attributes of composition. Yet I can witness beauty and admire excellence. While many of the nuances of Opus 109 were as lost on me as they may be on you,1 anyone would be astonished by a performer flawlessly executing his extended meditation on influence and relationships, inspiration and response, and recapitulating the past in order to create something new. All played in the key of E, making it easy to hear as a single journey, with the silence between each note equally critical to the outcome.
Afterward Ólafsson spoke about the recent death of Michael Tilson Thomas, musical director of the San Francisco Symphony and a giant in the world of classical music. “He did so much for the musical community,” said Ólafsson, “we don’t know what it means yet.”
That seeming aside was for me another revelation of how he saw a single human influence on the world - long and deep, with an effect not fully realized simply by the ending of a life. Like “Opus 109” itself, his comment was a statement about how our works exist both in the moment, but also in the context of our vanished past and our invisible, potential future. Living in an age of omni-directional surveillance, where everything is supposedly stored for review by our AI prediction machines, this sensibility borders on rebellion.
Those words landed with me perhaps because earlier that day I’d read2 about something called Historical Language Models. Also called Vintage Language Models, or VLMs, these ingenious creations use only text from specific historical periods. Thus, the idea runs, you can query the model and get an answer that reflects the knowledge of that particular time, uncontaminated by later findings.
On my third try with it I found a pretty bad error,3 so clearly VLMs have a way to go. Improved, though, they will be interesting tools for investigation and inquiry. Particularly if optical character recognition improves in cost and capability, and more non-English sources enter their corpus.
Still, I doubt there’s anything remotely accurate in the inventors’ claim that “while we don’t have time machines yet, we can simulate this experience” of talking to someone in the past via a VLM. Or in Benjamin Breen’s intriguing idea that this is a hypothetical first step in creating a collective consciousness of past humanity.
Breen moves the question away from the technology itself and back to authentic human consciousness as a thing in time, which Ólafsson explored for us in past and present, and which his aside about Michael Tilson Thomas extended to the future.
Plainly, if there is something like a collective consciousness within any past society, it’s unlikely to exist solely within captured and analyzed text. In 1900 about 20% of the globe was literate, and in 1800 the percentage was about half that.4 Go further back, and it’s tiny. Whatever was printed was largely for people with the wealth and leisure to read. Their interests may not equal people who struggled for bread and told folktales.
Adding more foreign-language texts will make for a richer corpus, but will also introduce new questions: How does the contents of, say, an Armenian newspaper in 1890 affect the consciousness of, say, a Japanese businessman of that time? The answer starts with, “Which businessman?” While there may be a collective consciousness, it still exists within individuals.
However much old text we log, it will not be coherent. Our civilization is now passionate about counting and storing everything, but what we retrieve from the past is haphazard. Just last year we learned something about Shakespeare’s relationship with his wife, thanks to a 1608 letter that survived because it was used to make the binding of a later book.5
The 14th century poet Francois Villon’s wrote, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” to describe our vanished living past. All the LLMs in the world will not change the reality of that loss. We can guess something about what’s in other people’s minds here in the present, often with success, and with even more sympathy we can approach a past consciousness, but only with great humility. Our approach will not be dramatically improved with a language model.
FWIW his third encore was recent. And equally haunting.
Like Ólafsson, we can think about influence, and how a creation in a later time both reflects the influence of the past upon us, and changes something of the character of that past work. It’s given a new meaning by the later sympathy. And in addition, human creation is an unknown gift to the future. Time is made out of the infinitely present moment, infinitely receding, as it creates the unseen future.
Even with the most powerful technology the present moment is irredeemable. That is, many would argue, the wellspring of beauty.
Then there are the physical dimensions of memory and thinking. Ólafsson developed the idea for Opus 109 after performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations over 100 times in just a couple of years. That repetition, as much as the sound, led him to hear their influence on Beethoven, a composer that he says his mother taught him must be played with a feeling in your gut. To this mix of sound and feeling, add that the pianist possesses synaesthesia, or the mingling of senses, so that he describes music in certain colors, the way you’d say a blade of grass is green. The Schubert piece was performed as a reflection on how Schubert may have been influenced by the preceding Beethoven sonata. More boundary-crossing influence.
Thinking of the highest sort can be physical as well as mental, emotional as much as reasoned, adrift in time and focused on the endless Now. LLMs are great repositories and sorters and relationship-makers, but they are human-made tools, like a monkey wrench, but with a pretense of greater meaning. They are never in time like Vikingur, or you.
Unintended Consequence of the Week: On Mt. Kenya, sheep farts now smell like roses.
According to the Financial Times, Kenya’s flower-growing industry is in a crisis brought on by the U.S.-Iran conflict. Kenya is the world’s fourth-largest flower growing economy, and its prime export destinations were Tehran, Dubai, Riyadh, and Doha. With fewer Mideast hotel guests and celebrations, however, and less-reliable air cargo services because of our global jet fuel crisis, its flower sales are down 50%. Since you can’t store roses, they are fed to the sheep. A strange footnote to the ongoing global impoverishment caused by this conflict.
You can hear him talking about it here
See the screenshot below.
In fact, Stevens was born in Reading, PA. That’s possibly an acceptable error, since in 1930 he was barely known. The real anachronism, in this model that supposedly stops at 1930, is that his first volume of poetry, "Harmonium," was published in 1923. He did not publish his next volume, "Ideas of Order," until 1936. Somehow this “time machine” is traveling into the future, too.
Admittedly, in the 1930 U.S. census American illiteracy was said to be just 4%. I doubt it, since close to 20% of Americans are currently thought to be functionally illiterate. Some 30% struggle with numeracy. Both statistics should be considered next time you hear AI will benefit everyone.
Thank you for this! I've heard Vikingur in concert before. Will definitely give a listen to Opus 109.
Remarkable piece of thinking and writing. This line is really powerful. “Time is made out of the infinitely present moment, infinitely receding, as it creates the unseen future.”