Alternative Editorial: Getting AI Ready
Prompt to MidJourney: “community, artificial intelligence, high realism, 2020s aesthetic”
Who remembers the moment just before the internet became all engulfing? That moment when we could feel ourselves in a steep learning curve with it, feeling out new ways of being connected and informed. But not yet able to imagine its real impact on our lives
Those under thirty would not be able to imagine the shift this implies, simply because they were born into its availability. For those who lived without it quite happily, the internet graduated from being a novel place to visit, to becoming an indispensable tool, and eventually to its central status as the co-creator of our reality.
This gradual shift in agency was not anticipated at the beginning of the journey—but the internet as an infinite space of digital connectivity is now thoroughly embedded in our daily life. We no longer rely on top-down authorities – our bosses, government, even parents – to set our personal agendas in the public space. Each of us is relatively free to set our own. Outside of office hours (and increasingly within), we can decide what we ‘need to know’ hour by hour.
For digital natives, the internet was there from the moment they were born. Society now expects not only a level of autonomy from its citizens, but also capacity. Ignorance of how to buy what you want, how to get where you need to go, or even to research the history of phenomena, now seems naive. More than that, with a social media run on algorithms that respond to your every thought and intention, the internet has become more like the very air that sustains you. There’s less need to master domains of knowledge anymore because Google is your second brain. And the knowledge it serves up – cognitive, sensory, emotional – has also wired you, in turn.
Having been brought up in a world of readily-articulated emotion, extreme diversity and multiple forms of agency, internet natives are also capable of using these capacities to make sense of their lives and plan the future. If we were using slingshots to attack whatever enemy we perceived, they arrive with a full quiver of arrows. What might once have been considered esoteric - play theory, spirituality, indigenous wisdom - is now just another available shaping of the questions we are asking.
Yet despite this growing knowledge and intelligence, we are nowhere near integrating its multiple perspectives, in order to find a complex, shared vision for a better future. Never before have we experienced such an amplification of individual and small group autonomy—
yet it has left us more fractured than before, not less. With no containing spaces for the infinite spreads of our experimentation, we cannot get any traction on the crises we face. Too many leaders, promoting their own worlds of meaning and praxis; not enough systemic action.
So yes, we are more capable than before, but do not work together on the most important goals. For lack of infrastructure—one appropriate to the entangled nature of the structures now breaking down, and the high-level complexity of a networked system now needing design--we cannot self-organise. [See our Indy Johar interview on entanglement over enlightenment in this week’s blogs). Thirty years on we live in endless possibility. But we are still heading for the cliff.
Incubate our own intelligence well enough to meet the future
Having lived through that revolution – which is still ongoing – it is surprising to find ourselves on the brink of another, equally unfathomable one with the current accelerations of artificial intelligence. Depending on how you look at this world-changing set of tools, now coming at us at high speed, we are either about to trigger planetary implosion, or bring about the world we have always been waiting for.
No doubt for the foreseeable future, it will be a hybrid of these two destinies. On the list of possibilities are, on the one hand, massive job losses, disconnected supply chains and unexpected episodes of violence. On the other, previously unimaginable creativity as transhumans (humans enhanced by these entities) generate new art and machinery; radical shifts in social values as people are freed up to do less mechanical workWill A; the climate fixed, as whole-global-intelligence is brought into decision making.
But is there anything we can do to ameliorate the reactivity in the public space over these next few years, as society simulates a pinball machine? Can we stop competing narratives simply bouncing off each other and ramping up anxiety, rather than having the chance to engage and explore possibilities for the future? Having learned some lessons from the introduction of the internet what can we get busy generating that might save us too much pain as we venture forth?
One of the most expressed worries is that – very soon – we won’t be able to tell what is real or not as AI becomes the master imitator. Not only in the digital space, where fake representations of real people can already be manipulated convincingly to put words in their mouths they might never say. But more chillingly in the wider public space, where you could get a phone call from a friend or family member that is only a sample of their voice extended to say whatever is dictated.
It could be that we very quickly learn to trust nothing we see or hear other than in person. But also, that in turn could lead to a revaluing of all that is live and breathing. As AG Co-initiator Pat Kane said in a recent article for The National (Scotland):
At this point, it’s easy to imagine yourself as the screamer on Edvard Munch’s bridge, turning away in panic at the lurid torrents of plausible text behind you. (And I haven’t even mentioned the currently stalled advance of the “metaverse”, which promises an integrated virtual universe for all these phantoms). But what does the screamer turn towards?
Many forecasters expect there’ll be a huge demand for the accessibly natural, in products, services or experiences – as ever, Scotland has almost an embarrassment of riches here. I suggest another reaction to the fakeness of everything – which could be the craving for public intimacy; for the undeniable reality of performance and performers, the sweat running down arms, backs and walls.
With a new appetite for the real, what might emerge? That could well meet the growing capacity for community gatherings of all kinds. Of course, festivals, markets, sports matches and spectacles are likely to keep growing. But where does all the energy go that’s generated by many bodies in one space, after the event is over? What happens to all the conversations, new relationships, trust and identities that were forged?
Until now, this incredibly rich activity is only captured monetarily, as tickets sold. But what if the social capital was also banked and used in new ways to strengthen the public space at this time?
For example, how can the urgent need to know and feel what is real be met by tools and practices that can help people to decide what they want to be real? And then make that wanted future possible – at first for their own community and then as part of a wider phenomenon of communities working together? Getting real about what’s coming down the line; being real with each other; making real the life you want (For more on this see Perspectiva's introduction to The Realisation Festival).
While for some this might seem a distant possibility, our observation has been that this move—into more community decision-making, wealth-building and regeneration of economy and resources has been growing for some time. We’ve been capturing it in our coverage of the community agency networks (CANs) global movement over the past six years.
While many CANs (the term is generic) started in the 60s – as co-operatives and ecovillages – others were enabled by the internet in response to the climate crisis (Transitions Towns, bioregions, Neighbourocracy). Still more arose during COVID – mutual aid networks, 15-minute cities and so on. Each initiative starts with a desire for people to come together locally, as occupiers of the same physical space, in the face of socio-economic-politically generated divides.
These initiatives honour and develop the need to get connected for both security and comfort. More often than not, this leads to deepening and enriched relationship. Out of this sociable buzz, shared desires for action arise. These lead to new forms of participation, deliberation and decision-making, capturing and embedding the growing sense of trust in each other and the community at large.
Isn’t that exactly what’s needed, as we sit trembling and unable to control the effects of AI coming down the line? Somewhere for each of us to go, feel the strength and power of real connection in the place we live? Ways of meeting without being polarised by the mainstream media that capitalises on our fears? Rituals that confirm our belonging – from eating together, celebrating holidays, or (maybe more ambitiously) harvesting food? These means of deliberating, decision making and initiating shared action add up to local governance, independent of our local authorities (though not necessarily against it).
Some might think of this as hard work or too civic for the vast majority to engage with (Oscar Wilde’s problem with socialism – “too many evenings”). However, we’re predicting the approach of AI will drive more people towards some form of community life. What they will be searching for is not more obligation, rules or closing down of possibility. But more liveliness – real, complex, engaged, pulsing life. More experience of human vulnerability and strength. More surprising imagination and surging possibility. Maybe even more failure and forgiveness. Little and large victories, over mainstream stories of our own powerlessness.
In this atmosphere, imagination will have to move quickly into assessing what is real and not real, as we respond to the multiple crises appearing in our everyday lives. Evocation of ‘what’s needed’ will have to be realised in the immediate present, even if only minimally, to build confidence.
One example might be local currencies enabling a UBI in the face of job losses. Or locally sourced canteens to meet the food crises. New forms of locally generated energy that everyone can access cheaply. Exactly the kinds of solutions that remind citizens that politics as we have known it till now, has failed to do the obvious.
But the race is on to get this kind of architecture of human agency in place, before the onslaught of AI’s impact on society. The time is now to organise ourselves – as a parallel polis - to incubate our own intelligence well enough to meet the future. Things don’t need to be “in the saddle and ride mankind”, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it. We can still take the saddle.