The Sky Painting Robot

On choice, pattern completion and controlled hallucination

I.

I was lying in bed at The Venetian, trying to sleep around 5am. Vegas is always relentless, but Vegas during CES is something else: the fluorescent overwhelm of ten thousand booths, each promising the future. I had obligations later. Rest mattered. But a thorny question wouldn’t let me go.

A week or two earlier, a reader had named what he called “the r…