CB
For the record, having spent a large amount of my adult life learning about and working with types of technology, at times within the ‘tech’ community I have developed a fairly deep cynicism about the utility of networks or software in generating any radical change, instead of really just exaggerating how things already are. However it dawned on me earlier this year that I was more scared and more curious about automation and machine learning than almost anything else, probably even climate change. Partly because the danger at this point in time is much less obvious and maybe requires a technical perspective to decode, but it’s much more serious the general public appears prepared to acknowledge yet. The rate of progress within the research community is insane and new papers with dramatic results and techniques appear on an almost weekly basis - and who knows what hasn’t been published yet or how it informs the intentions of various big corporations.

We’re already beginning to see the consequences of what happens when we redefine the structural conditions of what a “having a job” means, slowly dissolving any definition dependant on stability, location or even fixed periods of time. It’s possible the aspiration of “creating” new jobs may start to lose any political meaning - and that it doesn’t really feel like science fiction. It feels like we should all be talking about how we meet the challenges, accidental or otherwise, to generally accepted social values that have taken generations to cultivate and spend at least some time defining the sort of future we want in the face of what’s appears currently on the cards.

Beyond the pressing need to survive climate change and making continued progress in health, education, balancing equality and eliminating poverty it feels like we’ll need to restate or reassert what it means to be human since so much of our identity is related to in some way to what we do with our time. Ironically I guess it can feel like a waste of time to do anything but to tackle those easily identifiable very real and very difficult problems directly. However I keep returning to this feeling that there’s also something politically important, although for different reasons, in championing the importance of all forms of culture right now, both as a way of uniting people but also to help us navigate in an almost theological sense through a time of wild upheavals that might be coming.

I keep thinking about what culture is and how it’s one of the most obviously mystical aspects of humanity, and I don’t just mean ‘high’ culture or ‘fine’ art forms, I mean literally all the music, films, art, sport, dancing, story-telling, whatever, all that stuff beyond straightforward consumption, and it feels really important to state that at some point we might want to live in a world geared to creating as much of it as possible. After all, at some point in the future we may well consider ‘progress’ as the quality and quantity of culture we produce, even if we have to ask an A.I. to tell us if it’s any good. That last line is sort of joke mind you.

Anyway the simplest way of asserting what’s important of course is just to get on with it, so maybe this is conversation is just some arch-procrastination.

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