Looking back at 2020 from the roof

I’m on the roof.

It’s cold. December cold. The kind where your breath hangs for a second before it disappears. I’m in a jacket I should have zipped up before I climbed the ladder but didn’t.

The year is almost over. I’ve been trying to distill it in my head and I keep arriving at the same strange sentence: 2020 was terrible for humans and pretty good for robots.

A pandemic killed millions. An economy collapsed. People lost jobs, homes, parents, friends. The world went indoors and stayed there.

And while we hid, the machines advanced. GPT-3 learned to write. AlphaFold cracked protein folding. SpaceX flew astronauts and a Starship prototype. Tesla released self-driving software on public roads. Robots delivered packages and sanitized hospitals and took temperatures in airports.

I don’t know what to make of that.

It’s not ironic, exactly. It’s not a lesson. It’s just a fact. The worst year in recent memory for the species was one of the best for the technology the species is building. Like a person who’s falling apart but whose garden has never looked better.

The stars are out tonight. A few of them, anyway. City light eats most of them. But Orion is there, and if I squint, I can see the faint smudge of the Pleiades.

They don’t care about any of this. The virus. The robots. The economy. The stars were there before us and will be there after. That’s usually a comforting thought. Tonight it’s just a thought.

I’m going to go inside. Start the new year. See what the machines do next.

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