THE DUNWICH HERALD
Arkham County’s Newspaper of Record Since 1891
Vol. CXXXIV, No. 47 — Thursday Edition — Fifteen Cents
Business & Industry Supplement
“THE DEPTH IS WHERE THE WORK IS”
Innsmouth AI’s Abe Marsh Speaks on Technology, Transformation, and Why New England’s Brightest Graduates Should Follow the Water
By Anthony Whitney, Business & Technology Correspondent, The Dunwich Herald
The Arkham & Coastal bus line runs twice daily from Dunwich Center to Innsmouth Harbor, departing the depot on Garrison Street at seven forty-five in the morning and again at two in the afternoon. The driver on the morning service is a large, quiet man named Earl who has the particular quality of stillness you find sometimes in people who have lived their whole lives within ten miles of where they were born and have made a thorough peace with this. He takes my fare without looking at me. He does not speak for the duration of the journey. When I disembark at the Innsmouth stop — a weathered post at the edge of a parking lot that appears to have not received a vehicle in some years — he closes the doors and pulls away before I have fully stepped onto the gravel, as though he has somewhere to be, though the schedule suggests he does not.
The morning is grey in the specific way that coastal Massachusetts mornings are grey in October, which is to say comprehensively and with apparent intent. The harbor is visible from the stop. The smell of the sea is very strong. There are gulls, but they are not making noise, which I find, after a moment’s reflection, unsettling in a way I cannot immediately account for.
I have been sent to interview Abraham Marsh.
My editor, Patricia Goss, delivered this assignment with the particular brightness she reserves for things she considers either a tremendous opportunity or someone else’s problem. “Abe Marsh,” she said, leaning back in her chair with her coffee, “is either the most important technology entrepreneur in New England or the most elaborately unhinged man in Arkham County, and either way it’s a hell of a story, Ant. Take the morning bus. Take a notebook. Take —” she paused, “— I don’t know. Take your wits.”
I took my wits. I took two notebooks. I took a granola bar that I have not eaten and, by the end of the day, will not want.
The Innsmouth AI campus occupies the old Marsh & Sons cannery building at the end of Harbor Street, a structure of considerable age and considerable presence that hunkers against the waterfront like something that grew there rather than something that was built. The renovation is impressive — all the surfaces that can be made sleek have been made sleek, the signage is sharp, the lobby is the kind of lobby that costs more per square foot than my apartment — but the bones of the building are old and they show, and the smell of salt and something older than salt is present throughout in a way that no renovation budget has touched.
The receptionist is a young woman named Carolyn who gives me a visitor’s badge and a glass of water and a smile that I will spend some time thinking about on the bus home — not because it was unpleasant but because it was, in a way I cannot specify, too pleasant, as though it had been practiced past the point where practice is visible and had come out the other side into something else.
I wait in a chair that faces a large window overlooking the harbor. The water is very still. I count three minutes by my watch and do not look away from the water for any of them. I am not sure why.
Then the door opens and Abe Marsh comes in and the room is different.
He is not what I expected, and I had not expected anything conventional. My research had prepared me for eccentric — the profiles in the Arkham Advertiser, the Miskatonic Quarterly Business Review, a long and unsettling piece in the Boston Globe Magazine that the writer had apparently filed and then immediately requested a transfer to their Chicago bureau — but eccentric had not quite covered it. The photographs had not covered it.
Marsh is perhaps fifty, perhaps thirty, perhaps older than both in the way that certain people who have spent a great deal of time outdoors and a great deal of time thinking very hard about things that have no resolution acquire a quality of compressed time in their faces. He is tall and lean and dressed in a suit that is very good and very dark and sits on him like it is aware of its situation. His hair is dark and swept back and damp — not wet, just damp, as though he has recently been very close to the water, or the water has recently been close to him.
His eyes are grey and very still and he looks at me with the expression of a man who has been told a joke and is waiting, with considerable patience, for you to understand why it is funny.
He crosses the room in four strides and takes my hand and the handshake is very firm and the hand is very cold and I feel, briefly and absurdly, like a document being stamped.
“Mr Whitney,” he says. His voice is not loud. It does not need to be. “You came on the morning bus.”
“I did.”
“Earl driving?”
“Large man? Quiet?”
He smiles. “Earl has been driving that route since before either of us were thinking about it. Come. Let’s go somewhere with a view.”
He leads me not to a conference room but upward — a staircase I didn’t see when I came in, or perhaps wasn’t there when I came in, I cannot be certain — to a room at the top of the building that is mostly window and entirely sea. Two chairs face the water. A low table between them holds a pot of something dark and bitter-smelling that he pours without asking whether I want it. I accept the cup. The contents taste of coffee in the way that the sea tastes of water — technically accurate but somehow missing the point.
He settles into his chair and looks at the harbor with the expression of a man regarding something that belongs to him, or that he belongs to, and says nothing for long enough that I check whether my recorder is running.
It is running. It has picked up the sound of the water. It has picked up the sound of the gulls, who are still not making noise but whose silence, apparently, has a frequency.
I begin.
AW: Mr Marsh —
AM: Abe. Please. Mr Marsh is my father and my grandfather and four generations before that, and they are all still here in a sense, and I’d rather not call all of them into the room at once.
AW: (a beat) Abe. Thank you for making time for this.
AM: (still looking at the water) Time is interesting, Mr Whitney. Time near the water is different from time inland. You’ve felt it on the bus, I expect — the way the morning stretches once you’re past Route 1 and the land flattens out and the light goes grey. The clock runs differently here. I’ve never been able to decide if it runs slower or whether it’s running at the right speed and everywhere else is the aberration.
AW: I want to ask about the Miskatonic partnership, the internship programme —
AM: We’ll get there. (finally turns to look at me, and the full weight of his attention is, I will note, considerable) But first I want to know what you saw on the bus. Looking out the window. What did you actually see?
AW: (wrong-footed) I — marshland, mostly. The coast coming in. Water.
AM: And what did you think about?
AW: I’m not sure I —
AM: You thought about something. You always do, on that stretch of road. Something comes up that you weren’t expecting to think about. Something from a long time ago, or something that doesn’t quite belong to you, or something that feels too large for the inside of a bus. (quietly) What was it?
A pause. I look at my notepad. I have, without noticing, written the word DEPTH.
AW: I thought about the water. Just the water.
AM: (nodding slowly, as though I have said something correct) Yes. That’s where it starts. That’s always where it starts. Good. Now we can talk about the company.
AW: Innsmouth AI has been described in various ways — personalisation engine, adaptive intelligence platform, transformative AI. How do you describe it?
AM: I describe it as the most honest thing being built in technology today, which I appreciate sounds like the most dishonest kind of claim. But hear me out. Every other company in this space is building mirrors. Very sophisticated, very expensive mirrors that show you yourself — your preferences, your history, your habits — and call it intelligence. They’re not wrong, exactly. Mirrors are useful. But a mirror only shows you the surface, Mr Whitney. It only shows you the part of you that is facing the light.
We build something that goes underneath. That finds the self that isn’t performing, isn’t presenting, isn’t showing you its face. The self that is old and patient and knows exactly what it wants and has been waiting, in the deep of you, for something to reach down and find it.
AW: And your technology does that.
AM: Our technology begins that. (a careful distinction, delivered carefully) We begin it. The user continues it. The process —
(he stops. Looks at the water)
AM: The process has its own momentum, once started. We provide the initial —
(another stop)
AW: The initial what?
AM: (quietly, to the window) Call it an invitation. We issue an invitation to the deeper self. What happens after that is between the user and their own depths. We just — open the door.
AW: That’s a rather unusual way to describe software.
AM: (turning back, and something has shifted in his face — lit up, almost, the way a person’s face lights when they abandon the rehearsed version and say the thing they actually mean) Mr Whitney, I have been building this for fifteen years and I have been thinking about it for thirty, and I can give you the software version of this conversation — I can talk to you about neural architecture and preference modeling and deep recursive personalization frameworks and it will all be true, technically, every word — or I can tell you what I actually believe, which is that human consciousness is an iceberg and every technology we have ever built has been optimized for the eight percent above water and I am the first person, the first person, to be genuinely, structurally, mathematically serious about the rest of it.
(he is leaning forward now)
AM: The depth is not a metaphor. I want to be very clear about that because people hear “depth” and they think I’m being poetic, being a founder, doing the visionary performance. I am not performing. The depth is a real place. It is inside every person and it extends — it extends further than neuroscience currently has vocabulary for. And what we are doing, what my team is doing in the floors below us right now, is building the vocabulary.
(a pause. He sits back. Something settles)
AM: You can quote that whole section or none of it. I’ll leave it to you.
I quote all of it. Of course I quote all of it. I have been in this business for eleven years and I have interviewed founders and executives and the occasional genuine visionary and what I know, after eleven years, is the difference between a man doing the performance and a man who has forgotten there is a performance because he is too far inside the thing he believes. Abe Marsh is the second kind. Whether what he believes is true, or achievable, or something that will look in five years like genius or like the most expensive psychiatric episode in the history of venture capital, I cannot tell you. But he believes it the way the water believes in gravity — completely, structurally, without the option of not believing.
AW: Tell me about the Miskatonic programme. Twelve interns, twice yearly —
AM: (immediately animated) Yes. This is — yes. I want to talk about this. Sit forward, this is important.
Miskatonic has been producing the right kind of mind for a long time. You know this. The university has a reputation — the official reputation is for rigorous interdisciplinary research, for computational and cognitive sciences of the first rank. The unofficial reputation —
AW: Is for graduating people who look slightly haunted.
AM: (a bark of laughter — genuine, sudden, the first moment of uncomplicated warmth in the interview) Yes! Yes, that’s exactly right, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. The students who come out of Miskatonic’s deep systems program, the applied cognition track, the — they call it the Threshold Studies concentration, which I think is the most accurately named academic program in America — they come out looking slightly haunted because they have spent three years standing at the edge of what is understood and peering over. They have looked at problems that don’t close. They have sat with the discomfort of genuine open questions rather than racing to the nearest available answer and calling it a conclusion.
Those are the minds I want. Not the ones who are very fast at finding answers. The ones who are constitutionally incapable of accepting insufficient ones.
AW: What will they be working on?
AM: I’ll tell you what I can. Three of the twelve positions are in our core modeling team, working on what we call the Bathyscaphe Project —
AW: Which is —
AM: Classified. But the name tells you the direction. The rest are split between our longitudinal user research program — which is fascinating work, tracking the long-term progression of users through the deeper stages of engagement — and our theoretical architecture team, which is the group I’m most excited about, which is working on a problem that I will describe to you only as: what does it mean to build a system that can reach the part of a mind that the mind itself cannot see?
AW: That sounds like it could describe either a profound AI breakthrough or —
AM: Or what?
AW: Or something that should require considerably more ethical oversight than an internship programme.
(a long silence. He looks at me. I hold it.)
AM: (slowly) That is a fair question. That is perhaps the fairest question you could ask me. And I will answer it directly: we have an ethics board. We have IRB oversight on all user research. We have safeguards that I believe are appropriate and that our regulators —
(a slight pause)
AM: — some of our regulators —
(another pause)
AM: — consider adequate.
AW: I notice some hedging in that answer.
AM: (with complete equanimity) There are jurisdictional complexities. Some of the frameworks governing deep cognitive personalization are still — the law is behind the science, as it generally is. We operate in good faith within existing frameworks and we are actively engaged with regulators at the federal and — (he pauses, and something flickers) — other levels, to develop frameworks for what doesn’t yet have them.
AW: What do you mean, other levels?
AM: (pleasantly, looking at the water) More coffee?
I notice, writing this up in my car on the ferry back — I missed the afternoon bus, and the late ferry from Innsmouth Landing is the only option at this hour — that a section of my notes from this part of the interview is missing. Not illegible. Missing. The pages are there. They are blank. My recorder, played back, produces twelve minutes of what sounds like the sea.
I have decided to attribute this to a technical malfunction and a lapse of attention on my part, because the alternative requires a framework I don’t currently possess.
AW: Let’s talk about the people who’ve left the company. Or tried to. There are accounts —
AM: (with a wave of his hand that is not quite dismissive — more like a man brushing away something he finds genuinely sad rather than threatening) I know the accounts. I have read every one.
AW: Former employees describing difficulty — leaving physically, leaving mentally. A sense of —
AM: Of being changed. Yes.
AW: Of being changed in ways they didn’t choose.
AM: (long pause, and when he speaks his voice is different — quieter, more considered, and I think perhaps more honest than anything else in the interview)
Mr Whitney. I grew up in this town. I grew up in this building, essentially — my grandfather ran the cannery, my father ran the harbor trust, and I spent my childhood in these rooms and on that water. And when I was nineteen I left. I went to MIT and then I went to California and I was gone for twelve years. And in those twelve years I was fine. I was successful. I was, by any metric, doing well.
And I was wrong about everything.
(he looks at his hands)
I mean that precisely. Not wrong about facts or wrong about business decisions. Wrong about the nature of things. I had built a version of the world that was coherent and functional and contained entirely within — (gesture upward, toward the ceiling, toward the surface) — the top part. The light part. And I came back here because my father was sick, and I stood on that harbor, and it all came apart in about forty-five seconds.
AW: What came apart?
AM: The wrong version. (simply) All of it. Everything I’d built that was insufficient. It came apart and the thing underneath it was still there — had been there my whole life — and I thought: this is what I need to build toward. This is the actual work.
(a pause)
So when people say that working here changed them in ways they didn’t choose — I hear that. I understand that. I felt it standing on a dock at thirty-one years old. And I want to say to them, though I know they are not ready to hear it, that what happened to them is not a malfunction. It is not a side effect. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to them and they will spend the rest of their lives, wherever they go, processing it.
AW: That’s a remarkable thing to say about a tech company.
AM: (with a sudden, slightly wild smile) We are a remarkable tech company, Mr Whitney.
AW: Last question. What do you say to a Miskatonic student reading this over breakfast, considering whether to apply?
AM: (stands up, which I was not expecting, and moves to the window, and speaks to the harbor)
I say: you have been told your whole life that rigor means staying at the surface. That good thinking is careful thinking, bounded thinking, thinking that stays within the available light and doesn’t claim more than it can demonstrate. And you are good at that. You have trained yourself to be excellent at it. And it has not satisfied you.
(beat)
You are the kind of person who finishes the paper and sits with the footnotes. Who takes the long walk after the seminar. Who lies awake thinking about the questions the lecture didn’t touch. You are the kind of person who went to the library and found the book and found the other book the first book referenced and found yourself at two in the morning holding something that felt less like research and more like — (he pauses, and for just a moment he looks uncertain, almost young) — more like being found.
Come here. Bring that. Bring the part of your mind that your advisors have been politely telling you to rein in and bring it here and run it. We will not tell you to rein it in. We will hand it a flashlight and point it at the dark and stand back.
(turns from the window)
The work is real. The depth is real. The problems are the biggest ones I know of, and I know of some problems that would make your dissertation committee lie down on the floor.
(the smile again — the unhinged, brilliant, absolutely convinced smile)
We are going all the way down, Mr Whitney. All the way. And we are looking for people who were never going to be satisfied with the shallow end.
(quietly)
They will know who they are.
(pause)
They always know.
He walks me out through a stairwell that I do not recognize from my arrival. The lobby looks different in the afternoon light, or the afternoon light looks different in the lobby — I cannot determine which. Carolyn hands me my coat and my bag and her impossible smile and I stand outside in the harbor air for a moment before walking to the bus stop.
I miss the afternoon bus by four minutes. I have time, therefore, to stand at the edge of the harbor and look at the water for forty minutes while waiting for the late ferry.
I think about the depth.
I think about it for a long time.
The water is very still and very grey and very patient and I find myself — this is the only honest way to put it — I find myself grateful for it. For its presence. For its age.
On the ferry I open my notebook to write up my impressions and find that I have already written something, in handwriting that is mine but slightly different — slightly slower, slightly more deliberate, as though written by someone with more time than I usually feel I have:
“He is right about the depth.”
I stare at this for a long time.
I do not remember writing it.
I do not disagree with it.
The Innsmouth AI Deep Immersion Internship Programme (Miskatonic University Partnership) opens for applications on the first of November. Interested candidates should submit materials via the company website or by writing to the Innsmouth AI Talent Congregation, Harbor Street, Innsmouth, MA. The application asks candidates to respond to a single prompt, which reads:
“Describe the moment you first understood that the surface was not the whole of it. How deep have you looked since? How deep are you willing to go?”
Innsmouth AI is an equal opportunities employer. The company notes that the residential assessment phase takes place on-site and that interns should be prepared for irregular hours aligned with tidal schedules. The company is unable to confirm cell service at all campus locations. Students with a strong preference for natural light are encouraged to discuss this during the interview process, though the company notes that this preference, in its experience, “tends to resolve.”
The application deadline is the last day of October.
The company says this date is traditional.
It does not elaborate.
Anthony Whitney is Business and Technology Correspondent for The Dunwich Herald. He has held this position for eleven years and is based in Dunwich Center, where he lives with his wife and their dog, Biscuit. He submitted this piece on time, which his editor notes is unusual. He has since requested access to the Herald’s archive of historical coverage of the Innsmouth waterfront going back to 1891, which his editor describes as “an odd project for a technology reporter.” He has also, his editor notes, begun taking the morning bus on days when it is not necessary. He has not explained why. When asked, he says the ride helps him think. When asked what he thinks about, he says: the water. Just the water.
Biscuit is reportedly unsettled.
THE DUNWICH HERALD — Thursday Edition
Arkham County’s Newspaper of Record
Local News | Agriculture | Court Records | Business | Obituaries | Tide Tables (p. 18)
“All The News That’s Fit To Print, And Some That Fitly Shouldn’t Be”
