==

“Hatred is not the norm. Prejudice is not the norm. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, scapegoating ― none of those are the transcendent facets of the human personality. They’re diseases. They are the cancers of the soul. They are the infectious and contagious viruses that have been bleeding humanity for years. And because they have been and because they are, is it necessary that they shall be? I think not.”

Rod Serling

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“If you wanted to dismantle an entire generation from the inside out, it wouldn’t take much. Forget bombs or economic sabotage—too messy, too obvious. No, if you really wanted to destabilize a generation, you’d start with something far more subtle: you’d convince them that the world revolves around their feelings. You’d make them believe that every thought, every impulse, every fleeting emotion is sacred, and that the universe is obligated to rearrange itself to accommodate whatever’s going on in their heads.”

==

Hatred. Prejudice. Suspicion. Dislike. Jealousy. Scapegoating. All are feelings. Just as another tautophrase suggests, “the heart wants what it wants,” this tautophrase exists, “the mind wants what it wants.” This becomes important when you are faced with a world run on feelings. What I mean by that is that ‘feelings’ is a fragile construct so if you live in a 24/7 world, cable news/talk radio/social media/search engines/algorithms, which is constructed to game and use your feelings, well, you/we are fucked. In fact, in a ‘feelings world’ individual purpose is replaced by individual validation. Or let’s just say even the most well intended Purpose construct gets deconstructed in a feelings validation world. And when feelings are the compass, we become emotionally fragile and hyper-focused on self and ‘making it’ becomes less an objective, but rather a construction where you do not have the hammers, nails or architectural plan. This gets compounded because the worldwide web is a 24/7 sharing machine. We barely notice this constant input and output of information, this ceaseless sharing, yet, it has psychological, social, and emotional consequences. Our feelings become our stories and we instantly share our thoughts, feelings, experiences and stories with hundreds or even thousands of people. This ceaseless sharing subtly shapeshifts your behavior (even if you think it doesn’t). Multiply that by the millions of strangers who, day by day, offer you unsolicited input and you have entered into the ‘feelings overload’ zone. Simplistically, you have dematerialized.

Which leads me to concrete dematerializaton.

It was Annie le Brun who coined this term. It constitutes the progressive loss of all tangible relationship with the world. Basically, it encourages us to accept feelings as THE impression of living. Its kind of a subversion of a world of experiences where everything of value is in the experience not fundamental, pragmatic, tangible value received. It becomes a substitute for reality (and makes it easier to substitute value in what we may see as a failing world, i.e., a failing world of feelings. A ‘world’ can become a failing world if it ‘feels’ like it is failing (even if progress is occurring, prosperity is increasing and by any tangible measure living and life is improving). It just ‘feels‘ wrong. Oddly, ironically, this feelings world deprives us of real emotion inspired by originality and reality. It is a more banal view of reality and the world because there is no personal relationship to time and space – other than feelings. And because feelings are so nebulous and intangible, we begin shaping ourselves based on fragmented, crowd-sourced feedback, adjusting in real time like a social marionette. Ultimately our feelings aren’t really ours, but rather a conglomeration of strangers’ expectations. This has always been true, but as Toffler pointed out in Future Shock, in the past the audience feeding our feelings input system was finite. In today’s social media world that input machine is infinitely larger in scope. The entire world offers every impulsive input into your world. Visibility-on-steroids leads to vulnerability-on-steroids which leads to defensiveness-on-steroids which leads to feelings overload (feelings-on-steroids). We are not completely unaware all this is happening and, yet, we end up living semi-aware that all our ‘feelings’ are a little skewed, a little infected, a little warped by strangers, and,, generally speaking, fucked up. We grow into gnarled versions of ourselves in this fucked up algorithmic soil.

Which leads me to powerlessness.

Just like we are powerless against cancer, we are powerless to the manipulations of algorithms. It takes a great power, and objective responsibility, to fight back against algorithms. Unfortunately, it’s a responsibility that most of us are poorly equipped to handle. We tear ourselves apart over and over again not exactly knowing how or when to stop engaging with algorithms. Our privacy, and private thoughts, are now public. Yeah. In today’s world it takes an exorbitant effort to maintain privacy. We have to actively choose not to share, to resist the temptation to engage online, to keep our thoughts and experiences to ourselves. The truth is most of us are not willing to put in that effort and, in fact, almost believe sharing is the status quo. And here is where it becomes a danger in a ‘feelings world.’ When sharing is the default, we share without thinking providing a constant stream of outputs to a world waiting to offer unsolicited input. From there it begins feeling like, well, every feeling, in every moment, is a guiding star. Minor feelings feel like existential crises. This is where true powerlessness sneaks in. When people believe that their feelings define reality, they’re incredibly easy to manipulate. Outrage and fear are powerful tools, and when you feel them deeply, you will ‘feel’ like you deserve to take some extreme measures to alleviate those feelings. This obsession with feelings is a psychological quicksand. The more you try to control the environment to protect your feelings, the more vulnerable you become to any shift in the public context. In fact, you get pulled further and further away from reality. You stop looking at hard facts, inconvenient truths, or anything that might challenge the feelings bubble you exist in. In addition, you become an easier target for the algorithms and the dubious actors who reinforce your feelings, no matter how disconnected from reality it might be. Uhm. But it ‘feels’ right and, well, making it gets tied to those feelings. Making it, in this world, elevates feelings above logic, where validation is found through input, not tangible output. In fact, in this feelings world if your output doesn’t match up with what you believe you deserve, or ‘feel’ you deserve, it is no longer your problem – it’s because of someone or something else impeding what you feel is yours. You just become a pawn in the feelings game and ‘making it’ is nothing real; just a feeling. While ‘making it’ is a different post for a different day, suffice it to say if your idea of ‘making it’ is based on feelings and external definition, you are fucked.

“Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.”

Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

Which leads me to civic responsibility.

Civic responsibility is a way of insuring that even if you are self-focused, you don’t fuck over the collective ‘we’ (the community or society writ large). Civic responsibility is about caring for others, for everyone, not just oneself.  I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the easiest way to defeat societal norms is to limit access to civic education. This doesn’t mean someone is less smart, but they are less well educated in basic civic principles which, inevitably, makes it possible to abandon the morality of  a civil society. Without the basic education civic responsibility is often replaced by nostalgia or its partner – history. Ah. History is a tricky thing. History provides important context, but history also exerts a dangerous narrative gravity. If you expect the present to be a continuation of the past you aren’t actually looking at the present through clear eyes. The past suggests you can reasonably expect things. It suggests that things will obviously occur. The reality is the past only offers some patterns and patterns are only as good are only good until they’re broken. The past never predicts the future it simply offers possibilities and probabilities. What I would say is that civic responsibility is a drug to combat the cancer of the soul of society. Civic education diminishes hatred, prejudice, suspicion, dislike, jealousy, scapegoating. Civic education tamps down, well, personal feelings and enhances feelings of community. And, its quite possible, that a combination of civic education and civic responsibility increases one’s ability to fight back against the “feelings algorithms.” Ponder.

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

Within the sound of silence

Simon & Garfunkel

What if we can no longer hear the machines?

I thought about this the other day when someone suggested over the past years people have become more aware of algorithms and their effect. I answered that there was a difference between awareness and understanding. Anyway. Technology has certainly been impacting society, and the individuals within, for centuries, but this particular generation of technology and machines seems to be having a deeper impact on both society and the individuals within.

Which leads me what I believe is happening.

In the past we always had some warning, i.e., the ominous sounds of the machines bearing down upon us or pounding on our ears. The new machines are silent. No warnings. Divested of sound our anxiety has no source. This means that history and the future simultaneously become unseen, unpredictable, and unfolding with no forewarning as to what is to come. This would suggest without warning we fall into the wretched hollow in between stimulus and response. That hollow matters because, typically, we select a from several possibilities which vary contextually from place to place and time to time, but bereft of some important cues which would not only help identify not only the appropriate response but to help identify the parameters of the place and time, we skate on the superficial surface of algorithms feeding our worst instincts and tendencies, uhm, not our best stuff to lean in on.

Which leads me to the superficial surface of human instincts.

The reality is that technology can be quite human-like, but never quite human. Technology, at best, simply mimics humans and human societies. This is dangerous if we become dependent upon technology to help us define how to act as humans and what a human society should look like. Unlike ants and bees and any other non-human animal (which acts off genetics codes) we attempt to find cues for the rules of a human society through the uncomfortable participation in connection with other humans. This has been true for generations. Writing letters, telephoning, emails, and now things like Facebook and Instagram simply augment human interaction. In fact, one could guess that all those types of communication probably only work as well as they do because they augment all the ordinary interaction that goes on at the same time. The reality is letter writing, telephoning, even emailing, is low depth communication. High depth communication includes smelling, touching, tasting, and enough visual definition to be able to see facial expressions and body language. That’s important when thinking about stealthy algorithms because we should always remind ourselves that societies are formed and maintained through people physically interacting with each other. That doesn’t mean that as time goes by, and the physical connections have become established within the societal infrastructure, that an increase in proportion of interactions can take place without face-to-face human interaction. But. As someone said about the internet: people don’t see each other, but only what the software shows them. This creates an ambiguity between what is human and what is just human-like. What are actual images of people and what are constructed images of people. And that is important because if you believe that it is people who form societies and it is through their complex interactions within which the basis of society is formed then whether you are dealing with constructed images or reality makes a significant difference.

Which leads me to patients and impatience. Algorithms are infinitely patient while humans are finitely impatient. Years ago, Jaron Lanier warned us that algorithms didn’t attempt to change us immediately but rather through relentless nudging fractions of a percentage at a time. Algorithms patiently nudge us slowly bending the arc of our beliefs and attitudes. They prowl within human impatience seeking opportunities to not just bend the arc, but to shift one’s reality. It is within this soundless subtlety where the true danger lurks unseen, unheard and unnoticed. How dangerous and how unnoticed? I still have conversations with people in the advertising business, a business whose premised structure is nudging people’s beliefs and attitudes to affect behavior, that the 2016 election voting was affected by Russia and algorithms and Bots. I often wonder if people in advertising with true experience of how people’s minds can be affected don’t understand how algorithms work or they can affect people, how the general public can grasp the concept. Its subtlety is vast and relentless and patient. As Noah Smith just noted in a piece on TikTok and Chinese ownership: “overall, the pattern is unmistakable — every single topic that the CCP doesn’t want people to talk about is getting suppressed on TikTok.” And therein lies the subtlety. Its not that algorithms just highlight content; they simultaneously suppress content thereby implying less importance (or even less true). Yeah. Salience matters (for good and bad stuff).

Which leads me to the silence in equilibrium.

Many systems have equilibrium points, but there is a wide variety of types of equilibrium and, in fact, most systems have multiple equilibrium points. Uhm. But what if we cannot ever see them, or sense them, or, worse, be encouraged to believe one is there when it is not?  Its fairly easy to sense the possible dissonance one would feel in life if they constantly embraced a false equilibrium day after day. That person would constantly be at odds with, well, reality. That is, in my mind, the outcome of the sounds of violent silence. Ponder.

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“Not only are you responsible for serving your community, but you are partly responsible for there being any community to serve.”

Mary Parker Follett

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“In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the industrialization of England accelerated at such a pace that historians have found no term adequate to describe it save one usually reserved for violent political change – revolution.”

Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity

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Ah. Technocrats. This is a companion piece to “circulation of elites” just that this time I am focusing on technology and monopolistic technology autocrats who think of themselves as the elites to guide us all to a better future. Now. The bible of how technocrats have hijacked capitalism is Technopoly by Neil Postman, but the concept of technocracy can be traced to William Henry Smyth, a California engineer, who introduced the term “technocracy” in his 1919 article titled “Technocracy – Ways and Means to Gain Industrial Democracy,” which was published in the Journal of Industrial Management (Corporate Finance Industry). Anyway.  Technocrats not only have an odd view of capitalism, but of society in general. Generally speaking, they have an inordinate dislike of constraints which only encourages technological advancement without any constraints, or any real moral boundaries, as they believe the market will naturally sort itself out.  That is a dangerously naive thought. As Leo Marx said:

“The simple republican formula for generating progress by directing improved technical means to societal ends was imperceptibly transformed into a quite different technocratic commitment to improving ‘technology’ as the basis and the measure of — as all but constituting — the progress of society.”

The technocrats play an interesting game. They say just enough reasonable things to suggest maybe they are doing something good for all of us, and they even use some key enlightenment ideals without really understanding enlightenment. What I mean by that Is they tend to think of reason without any real boundaries. It is almost like they embrace Foucault’s nihilism. Rather than the philosophical ideas that are central to progressive society like a commitment to universalism over tribalism, firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress (Susan Neiman), this generation of technocrats tend to look at these ideas as disconnected rather than connected. In other words, progress above all even at the expense of universalism and justice. Their reason is justified by outcomes, not process and they tend to believe that all technological progress is good. This leads to a belief because they are forces of ‘good’ that their power should be unconstrained. Yeah. Its unconstrained technology development combined with unconstrained power. Ultimately this version of technocrat doesn’t really see monopolies, just ‘scale.’ That trickster nuance leads this merry band of technocrats down a path where business is more important than, well, anything (because they believe the business ‘serves for good of society’) and they see their redesigning of society as simply reengineering humanity (without tending to humanity’s needs).

• ** note: there is a significant difference between reengineering and redesigning. The former is simply reshaping the system and structure that exists, i.e., simply propagating an already existing flawed construct; the latter actually demands a vision to build toward, i.e., design something new and have technology enable it.

This can get a bit worse. Similar to the originators of the world wide web (most of which have reflectively accepted their naivete) they still view the limitless flow of information as a net positive for society and humanity. This includes limitless information flow to and from what their ultimate objective – computer intelligence which surpasses people’s. Their vision is all encompassing in that it envisions an entire system, an infrastructure in other words, to undergird everyone – regardless of (a) whether humanity has the capacity to absorb the limitless flow of information in any meaningful way, and (b) all will be equally empowered to take advantage of this new system. They seem to ignore, well, lots of things. But they mostly tend to ignore how power and control and information/knowledge pools. Maybe that is so because they see the existing pooling benefiting them and they see some undemocratic view of the world where a weird meritocracy is generated – weird in that it truly isn’t the best of the best, but rather simply the best at taking advantage of the system.

They are reengineering society, but just to be clear, they do so in the pursuit of scale and profit over safety concerns and public accountability. But maybe what should concern us most is HOW they seek to reengineer. Its not just that their objectives are a bit naïvely dangerous, but they also are crafting a structure of numbers and measurements (its kind of an extension of a belief that machines are the future so the way the future should be shaped is in machine terms).  They are shaking the entire etch-a-sketch of society and they don’t care if any of the sand is lost while shaking. They have a structured ideology of mathematical measurement to justify anything and everything. It’s a warped vision of even the warped Taylorism that got us to where we are today. It is almost like we are being led by an illiterate group of people in that their only literacy is in numbers, scale and machine technology wrapped in a loose, but extreme, libertarian etch-a-sketch. They weave webs of ‘progress’ under the guise of numbers – usage, engagement, and views – while ignoring whether those individual usages, engagements & views, are actually good for human beings. “It will all sort out” and “scale flattens negative affects” represents the technocrat mantra. They ignore the relationships between morality (what is good) and the power of the tools they are crafting. Once again, if you squint hard enough what they say seems reasonable, but stop squinting and it all becomes a blur of dangerously unconstrained technological innovations and systems. They will claim they are not doing this, but they are sacrificing progress for humanity and society for a hollowed out, but profitable, progress in business (because they see their ‘business’ as not really a business but a societal infrastructure development – for which they get paid for). I say all that so we can stop being surprised by the horrible existing leadership. They have no vision for what they are creating. They are just creating things assuming a vision will emerge from their technological wizardry. The past is all unworthy of consideration (even the important things of the past), they believe the future will be shaped not through some grand strategy but rather by chasing things – at exponential scale/pace – that seem beneficial, and numbers become proof of performance (note: numbers are not people). All of this is done rather than creating and sustaining a substantive healthy society.

Yeah. I know their arguments. Their entire argument revolves around “it is because of technology lives have dramatically improved.” The problem is that immediately veers into a warped unconstrained development with “if you restrain any development, imagine what you are costing humanity.” Yeah. Its technological development no matter what. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention something I pointed out in my “will of the institution’ piece. Business over the past 100 years has encouraged everyone, all workers, to view business in a religious sense – “business is the savior for not only you – your family – btu society in total. Technocrats simply warp that idea (an idea I would note has had incredibly negative repercussions to human psyche, meaning, life purpose and even the nuclear family) to an exponentially existential level – technology is THE hope for a better future. It absolves them of any moral clarity and suggests we, the people, would benefit by hedging our moral bets. To be clear, this isn’t anything they actually say out loud, but, similar to the robber barons of the past who argued they are beneficial to society, they will not say this shit. This means we cannot rely on some grand sense of business responsibility or moral clarity from these technocrats as they pursue unconstrained ambitions.

Which leads me to how their ambitions get conflated with freedom.

Throughout the technology world we hear endless talk of individual freedom, yet, there has never been such pressure for conformity from the market itself. I don’t mean capitalism, but rather when wealth is the objective, the peoples reduce their ambitions to speculation over reason – albeit we label it as being reasonable. In fact, technocrats depend on the masses to have blind faith in the value of reason while, if we are honest, it is simply speculative thinking at the moment (it sounds possibly reasonable with benefits, with no probabilities attached to the possibilities nor penalties). Reason sifts into every dimension of social life and technology is the tool of ‘reason.’ Reason becomes how we administrate a confusing life (and the sense of impending crisis), which means moral forces get kicked to the side. We become directionless other than that which technology wrought. Bereft of true sensemaking and morality, we plod along at the speed of technology. And technocrats endorse that vision through their ambitions.

If technocrats get their way, we will become a society of immense technological power where people will increasingly dwell in a world of illusion, or delusions, comforted by tribes of likeminded dwellers. Well. That’s what I believe. This isn’t to suggest that increased information flow to more people isn’t a good thing because it does inevitably increase the general knowledge of the population, but it comes with some problems if that information isn’t constrained in some ways and continues being delivered in its firehose way. Anyway. The only universality is not humanity and justice, but simply the ubiquitous reach of technology. Technocratic planning is simply an extension of the existing corrupted industrialization thinking – just on exponential steroids. The truth is the technocrat ultimately, sees economics as the sole measurement and technology is the material with which to build these economies. They see their private advantages as things which will inevitably ‘trickle down’ to public good. Its just a different, but equally horrible, version of trickle-down economics. Industrialization is, and has always been, a system to maximize material welfare. Technocrats may twist this truth as they discuss enhancing the brain, optimizing the body’s potential and any number of human enhancing features, but they do so with the objective to increase productivity and wealth. Technology is certainly only increasing its role in the weave of lives, personal and professional, and the general infrastructure of how life is lived. There is no lack of technology ‘plenty.’ But one should reflect upon the harsh truth that nothing cuts deeper to a society, or any business in fact, then the unhealthy relationship between ‘want’ amid ‘plenty.’ Technocrats cannot envision anyone ‘wanting’ in the future when the reality is, unless constrained in some key ways, while technology will be plenty, plenty of people will end up ‘wanting’ for something other than technology. I will say that the one thing the technocrats are clearly right on is ‘technological driven future is inevitable.’ Technology will only become more and more ubiquitous in our lives; often in some fairly invasive ways. Some of the issues this creates cannot be ignored and, I would argue, should be resolved before we go off to the technological races (this is an excellent conversation between Yuval Hari and Mustafa Suleyman, a cautionary pessimist and a reality-based optimist, on some of the issues at hand). We shouldn’t cast aside the machines, but we should view them as reasonable tools for progress, not unreasonable replacements of humanity. Technology has certainly revolutionized how we do things, but inevitably humans decide what to do. I fear technocrats want technology to decide what humans want to do. And maybe that is where I will end. With technocrats’ stronger belief in technology than in humans. This is important because, well, let us remember Mary Parker Follett’s words: Not only are you responsible for serving your community, but you are partly responsible for there being any community to serve. Ponder.

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“We’re making our decisions … or so we think. Yet in truth, ignorance, greed, and the scourge of immediate gratification are often the things that are making them. So if we’re going to truly live well, maybe the first thing we need to decide is who’s deciding.”
Craig D. Lounsbrough

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All of this goes to show that without the initiative that comes from immediate responsibility, ignorance will persist in the face of masses of information however complete and correct. It persists even in the face of the meritorious efforts that are being made to go beyond presenting information and to teach the use of it by means of lectures, classes, discussion groups.

Results are not zero. But they are small. People cannot be carried up the ladder. Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance.”

Schumpeter

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Technology suffers from nearsightedness. Yeah. I said that even as the technology futurists discuss 5G, metaverse, blockchain and more.  The trouble is while we get dazzled by some imaginative fantastical futuristic headlines, the reality is most technology business models are driven by lack of imagination and building toward immediate returns and feeding immediate consequences. What I mean by that is every innovative widget they develop is paid for with algorithms that drive immediate returns and immediate consequences. This is the underbelly of an instant gratification economy in that it is fed by (a) drive immediate engagement and (b) exploit human tendencies to engage. In other words, monetize immediacy. This misguided objective setting is exacerbated by purposefully conflating people’s needs and wants by exploiting the wants <not necessarily the needs> and isolating individuals over the collective <i.e., give me what I want even if it may not be best for all’s needs>.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out this technology nearsightedness is shared by many industry and policy decision-making leadership. As an example, energy independence today means reaching for whatever energy source exists today. In general, decisions are made to meet existing infrastructure not any future possibilities ignoring longer term consequences with labor patterns, environmental structural issues and even the fact today’s dollars are being invested in structure being outdated on a daily basis. In other words, each dollar is diminishing in investment as soon as it is used rather than investing in future structure which actually increases in value.

But I focus on technology today because they are playing mindbender with time frames to cloak unhealthy short-term consequences. It’s almost like the long-term considerations are too remote in the future <or they are naïve enough to believe “problems solve themselves”> to be concerned at the expense of present-day income/revenue.

The problem with this type of time horizon myopia is that technology is an exponential accelerant versus many other additive accelerants. What that means is yesterday’s 10-year time horizon can often become a 10 month or even 1-month time horizon. This means that time horizons have become so radically altered that having an immediate return/immediate consequence business model simply adds gasoline to an existing fire.

It’s a fault, a shortcoming as it were, in their capitalistic DNA. This fault is an impediment to technology being wholly effective or even truly desirable in a total-value-provided view. This shortcoming infects almost everything they do. Every innovation for the future of technology is cursed with this immediate return myopia. So while they speak of farsightedness and future, they are doomed by economic shortsightedness.

To be clear. This isn’t flawed thinking on their part, it’s a fault, a characteristic of how they think. Flaws suggest detracting from completeness <or the best>, fault points to things that actively impair progress from completeness or the best it can be. It is something that exists and inherent to the nature of who they are, what they do and how they think. This fault means technology, and technology businesses, will continuously only offer us empty innovations – empty of real meaningful long-term returns – which will continue to empty, and mar, society as a whole.

Look. They could refuse to think this way. Yeah. Refusal is always an option. It’s just that refusal comes with consequences. If you make a choice, then you’re responsible for the consequences – short & long term – of that choice and they are not willing to accept the consequences. Technology time horizons must be extended but, to be clear, to plan and behave with a more distant future in mind does not mean dictated, prescriptive, strategies and initiatives. I even say that with infrastructure in mind which demands a constructed (efficient & effective) future. Some agility does not demand shortsightedness, it actually demands situational awareness along a continuum of progress points. I would also note that being ‘future-conscious’ is not about having some Purpose. It is actually more likely to contain more transactional elements like integrity to a societal objective and sacrificing some simplistic black & white “cause & effect immediacy” and incorporating some rich & royal hues of expanding thinking and sensemaking.

Anyway.

I believe it was Toffler who stated “every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures.” I would add we should parse this discussion out to ‘want-fit futures’, ‘need-fit futures’ and preferable futures <the latter most likely being some combination of the two former>. In my mind this is not futurism, but rather ‘future-fitting.’ This may sound like I am dancing on the head of a pin, but the truth is we need to fit into a positive possible future and we are more likely to do so if we engage in the belief that getting humans, and humanity, from here to there is dependent upon showing a future they can fit in <a place in which it can feed both wants and needs>.

Regardless. Assessing the possibility, and probabilities, of future states demands assessing all dimensions of the future. What I mean by that is Pace Layering. Leisure patterns are different than geopolitical patterns and energy patterns and, yet, they are all connected <even in some fairly obtuse ways>. I bring this up because if technology focuses solely on immediate returns and immediate consequences, they, well, screw up pacing. This means an asymmetrical world becomes even more asymmetrical. Asymmetrical is actually the norm but the concern on this is that a complete lack of alignment leads to complete dysfunction. So, while it may feel dysfunctional now <society, etc.> the truth is it is most likely simply discordant pacing, not out of whack asymmetrical pacing – but that can change if technology continues to pursue it immediate’ business model.

Circling back, we need to increasingly focus on the interconnectedness of disparate events and consequences and devote increasing attention to the social consequences, to the individual and society, of technology. The mostly negative social and cultural effects of technology are becoming increasingly obvious and while there are likely a myriad of reasons, let me circle back to ‘immediate returns, immediate consequences’ as a mindset.

Look. Business has always been trapped in a short-term mentality and I tend to believe people have increasingly become more ‘immediate return’ focused <by the way, this may be a Halo Effect thing where it a is a looped consequence relationship>. That said. Technology is exploiting this AND amplifying it. We need to change the narrative. Change the mindsets and rearrange attitudes and beliefs. In doing so we can change reality.

In the end, I would suggest the technology elite shortsightedness view of immediate returns/immediate consequences, is a constraint, not just a fault.

As a parallel thought, while removing the constraint within an organization releases value potential/opportunity, the similar is also true in the marketplace itself. Knowledge should always be applied against removing existing constraints in the marketplace and in doing so value is achieved. And, in fact, the higher the order of constraint the higher the possible market value. I would argue, at least for today, an immediate return/immediate consequence attitude is a higher order constraint. This is a big issue and I don’t believe we talk about it in big enough terms. We point fingers, wave hands around and, in general, think of this as some issue too big to get a grip on. It is not. If we grip immediate return and immediate consequence and, consequently, throw it in the trash, we can permit the market, and technology, to pursue a healthier objective and vision. Ponder.

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“To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

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“If the world isn’t sane, technology will not solve it.”

Jaron Lanier

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“The new technology mimes the prime procedure of human learning and knowing.”

Marshall McLuhan 1968

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The title of this piece is a play on Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants.” The alternative title to this piece was I thought a lot of wrong good things.

When technology first arrived on the scene, particularly in terms of ubiquitous networks, social media, emails, anything internet based, I felt like many problems would be solved, civilization would just get smarter, we would make better societal decisions, and the world would just become a better place. I never believed that everything would be solved and we would attain some utopia, but like many of us, I was envisioning a better world because of this ubiquitous technology. And while many things have improved, and certainly foundationally, we still have the opportunity to significantly improve globally and societally, some things have certainly gone wrong. In many cases very wrong. I’m not sure I got the following things wrong, but I certainly overlooked what could affect the arc of the goodness. So, to paraphrase Marshall Mcluhan, let’s now take a quick tour of the walls knocked over by technology.

The first thing I can point to is money. Somehow, I seem to forget that, well, ideas are usually beneficiary agnostic and typically created with a specific benefit in mind that the people who use them will seek to make money from those ideas. So, inevitably what happens is the sincerely good ideas for society that cannot make somebody significant wealth may not completely go away, but they certainly do not end up at the forefront. Therefore, the other ideas, regardless of whether they’re good for society or not, are wielded as tools of gaining wealth. And as we all know wealth is amoral. It does not care how you attain it. I’m not sure that I’m naïve, or was naïve, I think I felt like technology itself, and maybe even ideas, had more power than humans. I think this point alone should remind all of us that the future really is not about technology, the future is in the heads and the minds of humans.

The second thing I got wrong was most likely driven by the fact that I am not a technology person despite the fact I talk about how technology affects society, humans, progress, and economics. I did know the technology would be subverted into economic endeavors. It made sense to me mostly because I felt like many of the tools that were being developed could navigate the efficacy path and actually improve communication, work and information flow. But, as I pointed out in the first thing, as soon as technology enters into the economic sphere money subverts its use towards, well, money. But that’s not the point of the second thing I was wrong about. I thought that the knowledge evenly distributed, and information evenly distributed, would make the intellectual tide rise higher. And as intellectual tide rose we would, generally speaking, have better sensemaking skills, we would make better choices, and some of the better things for society would just become more obvious to more people. I’m not suggesting that I felt or believed that technology would make democracy ubiquitous across the globe, but I did feel regardless of an individual country’s ideology, within those constructs, better decisions and better choices would be made. The world would not be perfect, but it would certainly be better. My lack of understanding of technology itself and algorithms and what we now call artificial intelligence bit me in the ass on this one. Information was never evenly distributed and, in fact, incorrect information tended to be more amplified and distributed. And, worse, I didn’t recognize incorrect information absorbed would become an attractor for technology to actually feed more incorrect information to anyone who initially absorbed the former. And while I’m a student of Alvin Toffler, and I clearly understood his point of view with regard to cognitive overstimulation, I imagine I did not see his point with true clarity until reality struck. The reality that the ubiquitous information machine was just simply too overwhelming for almost everyone’s brains to cognitively to assimilate in any useful way in addition to the fact technology wasn’t going to help us along the way. I never envisioned technology would step in and amplify a significant number of incredibly crazy stuff which created the cloud over the incredibly non crazy smarter stuff which would have made a better society.

The third thing I missed was how innovation relentlessly pursued incremental consumer quasi-improvements and wants instead of actual needs. Yeah. At the core of this is of course making money. That said. I imagine I focused too much on the potential good things rather than the sheer quantity of the less-than-useful versus not-the-best-but-good. Technology innovations tended to be incremental, asymmetrical, and relentless. Their work was not done in giant leaps, but in relentless, small, almost unnoticeable, increments. Platforms were developed to absorb the onslaught of new technological widgets, but even the platforms became overwhelmed. Maybe that is one of my points. If the technologists were incapable of figuring out how to manage technological innovations, what chance did the everyday human have? As a subset in this was how I didn’t envision the speed of obsolescence. What I mean by that is in the race to get things to market even the really good things technology did and offered became obsolete in the blink of an eye. Because most of the technology was actually incremental it became incredibly easy to make them obsolete with other incremental improvements. This had cascading consequences on both business and people. Business, once they had made a financial commitment, their commitment was for the most part unmoving. Their commitments, for the most part, couldn’t easily absorb the new innovations so they simply, pragmatically, accepted where they were as an improvement from where they had been. They had to accept better, but not the best, all the while wallowing in the anxiety that someone, somewhere, was better. As for people, once they learned something, there was something else they had to learn – at speed. There was no time to develop an integrated routine. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out all of this is good things happening, i.e., truly better technology – with some bad consequences. Asymmetrical adoption, inconsistent application, shifting foundational knowledge, it was almost like quicksand of general cognitive stress and anxiety that we were always behind. My point is while technology has wrought a lot of wrong, the underpinnings are still good, i.e., there is a lot of wheat amongst the chaff.

Still. But. I thought a lot wrong about good things happening.

Still. But. I am actually suggesting my thinking wasn’t wrong about technology, it was more about size and speed. What I mean by that is small things are different than when they are large. A tribe is, well, a tribe, but a mega-city is a mega-city – made up of multiple tribes interacting, cultures within cultures and communities within communities. I forgot social dynamics. This isn’t about complexity, or complicated, or even chaos, this is simple social dynamics. Platforms started for small, like-minded groups. They had some set of shared expectations, but when the ‘small community’ grew past their original audiences into wider audiences, and often at exponential pace, money took over some of the internal ‘scale’ aspects and expectations were subverted and no one had any time to say “hold on a second.” Regardless. Any smaller community will be affected by interaction with the larger community – especially if that larger community spans the globe. Any smaller community will be affected even if they rage against the larger machine because, well, the machine has learned to feed off that rage (Liv Boeree).

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“The universe has no single secret. It does not even hold a single nest of secrets to which some one study holds the key.”

Mary Midgley

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Which leads me to what I want from technology (and, hopefully, what we all want).

The only way for “us” to bring about a better future is through some sort of technological humanism.

To make that case — ultimately a case for restraint and more considered progress – we should build an optimistic story of how humanity would use technology to solve problems and thrive and that it can be integral in bringing in about visions of a fairer, more equitable future. I don’t believe technology is “the savior”, but I still believe technology can be integral to a better future.

“Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as environment.” Marshall McLuhan 1972

Yeah. I’m writing this and I’m not a technologist, but certainly of a generation that was technological optimistic, curious and ready to implement, with best intentions and some pretty good tactical objectives, some amazing things.

I tend to believe, at that time, most people thought technology was created to solve problems and in solving those problems society and the world would just become better. That didn’t exactly happen and I would argue that somewhere along the way society’s natural inclination for dystopian thinking overcame any quasi-utopian futuristic objectives, i.e., we focused on the bad consequences rather than the good consequences, so that all technology was seen as having a negative effect. As usual, a healthy future is found somewhere in between.

To be clear (part 1). I always, unequivocally, thought move fast and break things was only the harbinger of some unforeseen, but inevitable, doom. To be clear (part 2). I don’t think we are residing in a world of doom, but we certainly haven’t attained the drastically improved society of people living in harmony that many of us envisioned would occur. Part of the issue, as I have noted a number of times in the past, is that many of us were confident a better society would simply emerge. We were wrong. Not that the good parts of society do not exist, but maybe because technology had a nasty habit of over-empowering the more nasty parts of society. Or maybe we never really defined what we thought a better society was nor even offer up a vision to everyone, so that (1) technology overtly created things that would nudge us toward it and (b) show a scenario to society at large that they would incrementally nudge themselves toward somewhere within the 30000 decisions they make daily. This mistake was we treated everything as positively emergent. And in that space, I was wrong. Horribly wrong (a pragmatic business lesson lurks within there).

All that said. I imagine one of my larger points would be that rather than dwelling in the despair and the dystopian view of technology, maybe more of us should take a step back and remember the technology can offer all the positive benefits that we dreamed of at the very very beginning. Technology has never lost its ability to create a better society. Technology has never lost its ability to ensure a smarter, more intelligent, more critical thinking, public. Technology remains an incredibly useful and powerful tool to enable a better society. I say all that despite all the negative things that technology has wrought.

Let’s be clear though. The future does not really reside in technology. The future resides in humans. Decide what we want society to be, what we want civilization to be, how to be able to make people better thinkers, better sensemakers, better choicemakers, is a human choice. I am not suggesting a one worldview. I am not suggesting some global government. All I’m suggesting is that humans can decide what a good human should be. And then we design technology to enable that.

Even with all I have said today, while some technology has created some problems, we clearly are very dependent on the advantages and benefits it has provided. I imagine tucked in all the issues is a truth that the solutions technology provides outweigh the problems it has created. That doesn’t mean we should only focus on the benefits nor does it mean we should focus only on the problems, just that we should maintain some perspective.

Personally, I believe we society people and technology are in the liminal space – possibly the space defined by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock. What I mean by that is all the shock aspects that he outlined are exploding in this time in space that we live in. Or as Czech president Vaclav Havel said:

“It is as if something were crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself – while something else still indistinct were rising from the rubble.”

With that I will end with Marshall McLuhan.

“Perhaps the terrifying thing about the new media for most of us is their inevitable evocation of irrational response. The irrational has become the major dimension of experience in our world. And yet this is a mere byproduct of the instantaneous character in communication. It can be broad under rational control. It is the perfection of the means which has so far defeated the end, and removed the time necessary for assimilation and reflection. We are now compelled to develop new techniques of perception and judgment, new ways of reading the languages of our environment with its multiplicity of cultures and disciplines. In these needs are not just desperate remedies but roads to unimagined cultural enrichment.”

Ah. “Roads to unimagined cultural enrichment.”

I imagine I purposefully end on an optimistic note because in the end I believe technology has the means to offer more good than bad. Ponder.

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“To satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house dog.”

TS Eliot

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I imagine this metaphor summarizes much of our current public narrative. As we all argue over what we deem the practical questions of the day, it is like we are the house dog munching peacefully on the meat while the entire house is looted. Much of this discussion centers around the role that the computer and technology play in our lives. That is the wrong discussion. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, the reality of how we think, our values and, ultimately, how we shape our views of reality. The truth is technology alters the structure of all – our interests as well as the things that we think about. But maybe most importantly is that they alter the structure of how we actually think and what we value.

While I clearly believe that humans control their own destiny in terms of shaping how we think and how to cognitively manage ourselves, the truth is that everything must give way in some degree to the technological onslaught. And this onslaught not only changes the shapes of our thoughts, but it also brings a scalpel to culture. Oh. I am not suggesting that technology affects culture with precision, but rather as technological tools are embedded into culture, they will methodically begin slicing and dicing culture’s substructures. These tools have no ideology, no real bias for truth, and no solid objective except that which the tools are designed for – engagement, activity, usage. That is their mindless bid to become the culture so that they can thrive. I say that to suggest everything that we think will be forced to either fight or defend itself if we do not want these tools to ‘work upon us.’  And when is say ‘everything we think’ I include traditions, politics, norms, values, religious beliefs, social ethics, myths .. everything. If you don’t actively evaluate what is important to you, I can guarantee you will not be able to fend off technology. Maybe it would behoove all of us to think about physicist James Prescott Joule who suggested nature is very parsimonious with energy and that energy is neither created nor destroyed but merely converted from one form into another. I say that because technology is an energy user in search of, well, energy to convert TO ITSELF. I imagine my point here is that if we continue to feed it our energy and it keeps on sucking up more and more of human energy, well, what’s left of us after it has done all its work upon us?

In the end. The problem is that we, people, end up serving technology rather than technology serving us and our needs. And I imagine that goes for all the technology tools, not just algorithms. Little by little they work upon us, we munching on the meat the burglar gave is while our minds are being looted. Ponder

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THE NEURAL INVESTMENT

Events speed past us, compelling us to reassess our assumptions — our previous formed images of reality. Research topples older conceptions of man and nature. Ideas come and go at a frenetic rate. (A rate, that, in science at least, has been estimated to be twenty to one hundred times faster than a mere century ago.) Image-laden messages hammer at our senses. Meanwhile, language and art, the codes through which we transfer image-bearing messages to one another, are themselves turning over more rapidly. All this cannot — and does not — leave us unchanged. It accelerates the rate at which the individual must process his imagery if he is to adapt successfully to the churning environment.

Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

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Here is the weird thing. Time is still the same (an hour is still an hour, a day is a day and a minute is a minute) and gravity is still gravity and the relationship between the two, well, remains the same. I won’t suggest there aren’t more things, more stuff, more distractions, then ever, but we – people – manage the same amount of time, the same cognitive skills, and same attention spans that we always have. This becomes a bit important because if we can accept that the world isn’t really going faster, and that there is just more stuff, and the issue is how we, our brains, accommodate all that stuff, then we can begin the hard discussion of the battle of the brain. To be clear this is (a) not an intelligence thing and (b) I’m always a bit surprised workers who work in an office environment don’t understand this issue. What I mean by that is I’ve worked with incredibly smart people who alternatively sucked working in a fast-paced speedy context, like retail, but thrived in a steadier more consistent paced environment. I do not believe that is unique some people thrive in fast paced, assimilating information relatively well and relatively quickly and some people do not. There are intelligent people in both buckets, but in most cases each individual has optimized their neural investment to the context within which they exist AND their cognitive strengths.

Which leads me to the neural investment’s biggest current enemy: technology.

Technology is now all encompassing and ever present. No decision or action or very, very, few can be executed without the tools it provides. This obviously affects the cognition of everyone who uses these tools and will certainly impact individuals, groups, communities, at all levels – psychologically to behaviorally – with human consequences. This is a looped relationship where systems impact humans and humans impact systems. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that humans, even when they are making errors, impact systems. The consequence of all of this is that we are constantly being pushed to the limits of our knowledge and our cognitive potential. Let’s be really clear on this. Technologies target is clear. We may talk about productivity, we may talk about efficiency, but its real target is our brains – intelligence both individually and collectively as a group. I call this a battle of and for the brain. Technology is either purposefully, or just as a consequence, altering the cognition of humans who are often unaware of the attempt. Or, to be generous, we minimize what we believe the effect which only encourages us to react too slowly or just inadequately. We are in a psychological, social, technological, battle whether we accept it or not. We can no longer ignore this important battle. Purposeful or just simply as a byproduct, technology’s actions are manipulating our cognition mechanisms and, in most situations, it weakens it, influences it, and at its worst destroys it. And because this particular piece is about humans this means that we the people need a higher level of discipline. We need to be cognitively aware of our limits as well as better recognize the biased presentation of a reality often digitally altered intended to favor the interests of the one providing the manipulation. We need to increase our cognitive resilience to avoid the exploitation of cognitive biases the increased likelihood of cognitive errors the increased manipulation of our perceptions the increased likelihood of how our attention spans can be overwhelmed or steered and the increased cognitive stress induced. All of the things I just suggested have predictable consequences on our mental acuity or social relations and our motivations as well as the efficiency of communities, society, and organizations. Toffler called it neural investment I’m suggesting that we recognize the cognitive aspects AND make informed decisions on our neural investment. This will be a challenge because this neural investment spans an array of cognitive paradoxes:

• the decision/indecision dichotomy
• cognitive errors and biases
• perceptions and illusions
• influence and manipulation
• psychology and behavior
• the sense of the interaction between users and systems
• autonomy, ethics and motivation in the loss thereof, i.e., despair
• morality and the clash of values

Once again when we talk about neural investment, we are speaking of not only the single person, but including the entire sociotechnological system. From one to many, when technology stresses us, it stresses our ability to solve complex problems which are typically dependent on how information is represented, understood, and developed. Whether we like it or not we must take into account the strengths, limitations, vulnerabilities, and diversity of everyone involved in decision making, i.e., everything in life. This has become admittedly more difficult over time as ‘the enemy’ has grown stronger. As technology has matured the design of it has taken into account the differences and characteristics of users in order to encourage spontaneous use as well as addictive use. Technology has become more knowledgeable with regard to how it can manipulate for greater integration of human users within the system. Objectives have gone from simply facilitating the user experience to instigating, or even dictating, how people behave. It seems like the technology world has basically settled on encouraging the use of digital tools that disrupt, with the intent to affect, all levels of our cognitive processes. They have an influence over our psychological, relationship, motivational, dimensions even sowing doubt or consolidating certainties within our mental decision-making trees consistently targeting individual cognitive abilities directly. Technology is relentless with regard to altering our perceptions, reality and behavior. Worse, once it senses a shift it attacks it. It will seek perception and augmenting and even mental modification and with that we either learn to defend our brains or lose.

Which leads me to experiences memories and attention.

Our neural investment is grounded in our formed images of reality and our formed images of reality are typically grounded in experiences. This does not necessarily mean things that we have actually encountered and done, although those things do create deeper memories, but it could be words we’ve encountered, pictures we’ve encountered and opinions we’ve encountered. All of those things subconsciously gather together in certain parts of our brains and create some memories. Many of those memories are not causal, but actually a concoction of disparate experiences which coalesce into some memory. I worded it that way to suggest that sometimes memories are not exactly the most exact things. And they absolutely are not true reflections of reality, but they are the best that we have. And from those memories we find value. What I mean by that is those memories are valued by our brain therefore when we bring these memories to the forefront either when we’re ready to make a decision or reflect upon the present situation; they represent value. That value drives our attention. The sobering thought to end that discussion is, and this may sound odd when discussing very personal experiences and memories, garbage in & garbage out. Effective neural investment is an attempt to manage the garbage in so that what comes out is just a bit less garbagey.

I bring all that up because when we do talk about Neural Investment or being cognitively overloaded it doesn’t mean that we stop and don’t make decisions. In fact, we make over 30,000 decisions on a daily basis. My point here is that because there are so many of them, and because we do need to invest some brainpower even on the most instinctive choices, we lean in on our memories and apply them to our attention, assess what we elect to pay attention to and make choices. I hesitate to say this, but as a generalization this would suggest that we don’t really adapt successfully to a churning environment. In fact, what it appears we do is take our square peg memories which we have associated value to, use them, and what we discern we need to pay attention to, and put that square peg memory into any shape sized hole that our attention has pointed us to. Effective neural investment won’t completely change that but maybe we could make some inroads on becoming a little less laissez-faire with regard to our attention, experiences and memories.

Which leads me to leaning into attention, experiences, and reshaping memories.

All the speedy looking and feeling stuff only encourages us to grab onto whatever shiny object looks appealing and make more important decisions based on our memory banks. Neither is particularly healthy or helpful.  Unfortunately, we have a collective shortsightedness grounded in “living in the now,” but in order to maintain a thriving life it demands a long view. You need short term results without being shortsighted. You need a long-term view while ‘being’ in the short term. Stealing from Stewart Brand’s “how buildings learn,” I call this ‘navigating the long now.’

Let me explain. Our brains almost demand a long view in order to, well, survive and thrive. Our brains are our personal ‘civilizations’ we exist within a larger civilization system constructed in layers in which there is a very strong, but flexible structure built to absorb shocks and, in most cases, incorporate them. Instead of breaking under stress, like something brittle, the system yields as if it were malleable and yet parts move so slowly, they seem like they are unchanging. So, when it comes to reshaping our memories, or at least how our memories are shaped, we should be thinking:

• Fast learns, slow remembers.
• Fast proposes, slow disposes.
• Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.
• Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution.
• Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.
• Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

All durable dynamic systems, including our brains, have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.  Navigating the long now leverages longevity to optimize value in the Now through what we pay attention to and, as a result, what experiences we have. I suggest all of that because if your ‘experiences’ are shaped by short term, your memories are a bit more fragile and brittle (and certainly of less deep value) and therefore the memories you lean in on when making choices are, well, more brittle and fragile. If we begin to become a bit more thoughtful with regard to what we pay attention to, to how we engage with our experiences, the memories created will exhibit more robust value from which, when tapped, will make future decisions more robust and resilient.

Which leads me to, for some reason, open-source coding.

Open-source coding is an example of a collective group of people taking on a challenge and an issue so that each individual would benefit. The first significant community developed software movement took the intellectual Commons approach. That approach was fairly common in the academic and scientific communities where self-organized collaborative communities of scientists had come together through private networks to pool their brain power or share insights around a particular science or math problem. The Apache Web Server has its roots in this form of open sourcing. I won’t go into detail on Apache, but I recommend everybody reading about its origins. Interestingly. Meta/Facebook is currently doing something similar with Llama. But the real point of intellectual Commons is shared intelligence with the intent to create the best common product possible for the individual. I imagine my second point is that you don’t need a PhD or actually have any credentials and you can contribute. The point is if we could combine our time and collaborate, we can create something better for our brains that almost anybody could effectively manage their neural investment. But to me one of the most interesting points about intellectual Commons and open-source coding is that because of its collaborative construct the coordination and direction is representative of emergent behavior, i.e., it shapes itself to the issues at hand, based on whoever shows up and who actually wanted to write code. And maybe within that is buried my most important point. Neural investment is not just an individual choice; it’s a collective choice. The battle for the brain may be fought day to day within the cognitive constraints of an individual brain, but it’s actually gonna be won through the collective brain. Within our collective imagination and our collective intellectual there’s a solution. We may not have it today but it exists. But, once again, people need to be purposeful because, stated or not, technology is pretty purposeful. It purposefully exploits, often degrades, or even destroys, how someone builds their reality, their mental self-confidence, their trust in processes and systems, and the approaches required for the efficient and effective functioning of communities and societies.

But lets be honest. Technology is not going away. Inevitably we will simply have to make a bargain with technology as it gives & gives and ‘takes.’ This bargain is going to lead to a cognitive battle with technology which will demand a neural investment simply to survive. Ponder.

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“We now live mainly in the map, in the recreation of reality, rather than in reality itself.”

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

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Technology has confused the discussion. It has encouraged us to think of different ‘realities.’ The argument becomes we transcend, in some way, physical reality (which, of course, is <1> also mindset, attitudinal realities and <2> bullshit). Don’t get me wrong. I firmly believe technology can elevate thinking, awareness, knowledge and possibilities, but, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and the metaverse will never replace physical reality. In addition, Chatgpt, algorithms, and AI fundamentally cannot reason so they will never replace human reasoning. But tucked within those thoughts lie technology’s greatest opportunity. Instead of offering different realities, it should be leaning INTO physical reality and structurally enhancing the possibilities of, well, reality. That would demand we, people, began focusing on the right things and the right things within technology. Oh. And make sure we adopt the right attitude. By attitude I mean we need to get a grip on “everything is going faster” because, well, its not.

The reality is that the rate of technology change is no longer speeding up, what is speeding up is the social impact of all the technologies as they not only connect with each other, but become increasingly embedded in everyone’s social connectivity AND as a way of doing things. The embedded aspect is a bit important because technology has become a tool we use to shape our lives and livelihoods.

And that is important because this means is that technology is nothing until it is attached to a human – and, consequently, to other humans. I imagine my point is that technology can help shape the landscape but reality is dictated by humans. Uhm. Unless we elect to live in the re-creation of reality which would mean <1> accepting destiny is shaped by others not “I” and <2> we will have accepted living in the mere shadows of reality and not the rich & royal hues of reality.

That would be sad.

People shape reality and, in particular, the imaginations of people constantly reinvent a better reality – technology cannot do that.

Anyway. This is how technology can shape reality. It simultaneously:

• Creates more random connections
• Amplifies without prioritization
• Is unobviously emergent (unpredictable patterns)

All of those things occur, simultaneously as I noted, through what technology is – a networked distribution platform. It distributes data, information, thoughts, ideas and, yes, even expectations. Those are things that shape the map of reality, but it is simply a poor, incomplete, version of reality.

And maybe that is my point.

Technology can certainly enrich learning and awareness, but it cannot reason. It can only give us glimpses of reality – albeit LOTS of glimpses which we could confuse with reality as a whole. But if we elect to live THROUGH technology rather than living with technology as a tool, we do run the risk of, well, living in some poor-ish re-creation of reality rather than reality itself. I do not believe that would be good. For us as individuals as well as us as civilization. Don’t let technology confuse the discussion about reality. Ponder.

Analog – June 1962 – cover artist – John Schoenherr

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 “The single most important thing that could be done would be to substitute reasonably accurate positive images of the future for the depressing images that now prevail, especially in the Advanced Capitalist nations.”

futurist Herman Kahn in the 1970s

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It is just as deterministic to say “if we build social media, the world will be a more connected place” as it is to say “social media will destroy democracy.”

Danah Boyd

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“We saw Cyndi Lauper convincing a gentleman in a suit to put down his newspaper and dance, I saw a world of possibility, one in which adulthood could be fun, with surprise waiting around every corner.”

Shane O’Neil on the 1980’s & 90’s

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I almost called this ‘refinding technological optimism.’ Okay. Maybe it is more about anti-technological dystopia. I am not suggesting we be utopian, just that I question why we should ditch optimism. I thought about this in a conversation with Faris Yakob as we pondered our possibly naïve optimism about technology in the early 2000’s. Anyway. Two of the books I consistently pluck off my shelf to remind myself that technology dystopia has not always been the norm: The Cluetrain Manifesto and anything by Jaron Lanier. And while I imagine the Cluetrain authors may suggest that they were naively optimistic, I don’t agree with them. In those heady days technology was going to offer us many of the things that would solve, or resolve, many of the societal issues at hand. And technology, for its part, has held up its end of the bargain. Where things go a bit awry is with humans. And if you agree with that, fundamentally, anything humans make can be unmade. Just because some of the Cluetrain and Lanier positive possibilities have not occurred, doesn’t mean they cannot.

But let’s get to the optimistic part.

The roots of technological optimism arise way before the internet and computer technology. Its roots are grounded in technology (a) better utilizing resources against growing demand and (b) easing some of the societal issues through more efficient productivity/use of human time. Technological growth, in the minds of the optimists, meant technological advance where humanity got more output per unit of input – rather than simply more of an old technology. The optimism gained some momentum with the idea of ‘exponential.’ Technology was to provide exponential benefits rather than a more plodding additive or even multiplicative. In other words, today’s limits would look silly in the future because of the accumulation of a seemingly endless amount of breakthroughs. For the most part, this happened. But. We were also offered a blueprint for what could go wrong at this time. Toffler and McLuhan outlined the cognitive issues (human limits) and Anderson outlined the market issues in The Long Tail theory. Fragmentation in the market, profited exponentially, and humans, cognitively, didn’t quite profit as much. The exponentiality was indifferent to symmetry and asymmetry can be a motherfucker to humans and their minds.

But let’s get back to optimism. Distorted market incentives are solvable, businesses and institutions structured to exploit technology can be solved, even societal expectations and objectives can be solved. None of those things have anything to do with technology; they are human issues. That said. Constructive technological advances could enhance human solutions to those things. Technology, in the right hands, could even combat some of the negative features of existing technology.

To be clear, this optimism is not utopian (although I do believe we should do some more utopian thinking). This optimism is rooted in what we know and what we can actually do. To make a point, almost everyone who signed the AI “pause” letter could, if funded well, could develop technological solutions to much of what dystopians lose sleep over. I say that to suggest we should have technological optimism … as long as the right humans are involved in technology’s future. I imagine my grander point on that is technology has not failed us, we have failed technology. And within that we should find some optimism because no matter how bad people can be, good people have a gravitas that bad can never attain.

“In the long run, optimists shape the future.”

Kevin Kelly

Which leads me to shaping.

An optimist almost has to believe, in some form or fashion, that exponential technological growth will expand resources and minds ahead of exponentially increasing issues. This is a tough thought in today’s world because from most people’s perspective technology is an aggravating factor – amplifying all that is bad – rather than an expansive factor – amplifying possibilities and imagination to be mined. But once again, the problem isn’t the technology; its us (humans). The undesirable, aggravating characteristics, consequences of technology are reflections of humanness which many of us simply ignored or submerged under a variety of other things (results, altruism, etc.). Market forces are most typically a reflection of humanness. That is not to say technology doesn’t tweak our worst instincts, just that technology is equally a force for good and bad and only pursues what we want to pursue. The consequences are more us than it is ‘them’ (technology) so if we optimistically shape our technology we can shape a more optimistically good world.

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“I don’t think our goal should be to create conscious intelligent machines. Everything that makes a machine useful are generally the things that are not human, why do we need to create an emotional, unpredictable, volatile, machine and put it in charge of something mission critical. The whole point of machines is to do they can do the things we don’t trust humans to do consistently.”

Mike Walsh

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The fact of the matter is, McLuhan was right: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Technology is not just about things and devices; it is about processes and verbs and attitudes and people. You have to be a little careful about what technologies you adopt, because each technology is, broadly speaking, a way of doing things. Maybe we place optimism on top of these questions L.M. Sacasas suggests:

1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?
3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
6. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
7. What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?
8. What practices will the use of this technology displace?
9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
10. What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?

Which leads me to suggest technological optimism is about faith and craft.

To be optimistic is to believe in human ingenuity with no foreseeable limit. Technology can be crafted as an unending cascade of advancement. What this means is a belief that each advancement can not only eliminate the present technological issues, but also stretch the limits of what is currently possible. In its constant stretching both good, and bad, can occur but the good is constantly erasing the bad. Yeah. It’s an understanding that technology is both empowering/enabling and oppressive/constraining; often simultaneously. But within optimism is a rejection of a conclusion that the world is ugly and the people are bad. Optimism rejects dystopia as well as the status quo. I believe the status quo never invents the future, and vision, creativity and innovation crafts the future. Yeats is correct, the center cannot hold, so the center may be the status quo and who’s happy with that today? Instead of griping about what’s deplorable, it seems a discussion about the future would be much more interesting. We can wring our hands all we want, but there’s no going back, so what’s ahead?

“Well, that’s the universal law of technology, that it can be used for good or evil.”

Michio Kaku

“Ahead” technology discussions today careen between an anticipation of doom or deliverance. All of today’s technologists, while they craft for utility, power and profit, appear to have as their north star as rationality. Somewhere along the way the technologists lost the distant dreams and aspirations for a better world. Sadly, I believe this is a reflection of business and society in general (it is a tough time for dreamers these days). While tools could have been shaped to shape a better society and world, the tools were shaped – by human hands and minds – to serve financial objectives (which, obviously, is the easiest way to pay for the technology). So. While we should expect far more from our technological innovations then convenience and efficiency, or even cognitive survival, we do not. It gets a bit worse. We also demand deliverance from problems, even the problems that technology creates, from technology. Yeah. Technological growth clearly aggravates real human problems and it is silly to optimistically count on technological advance to solve all of them. Technology is a mixed blessing capable of producing undesirable as well as desirable consequences. The mixed consequences of technological development is an issue that becomes more critical the more technological advance entails risks with catastrophic potential. That said. There is only “ahead” and we should be focused on delivery (and deliverance from dystopia), and not doom.

Which leads me to why dystopia is so much easier than optimism.

Part of the issue is that technology has become a God-like tool for, well, everything to, well, everyone; not just technological optimists.  As Alan Turing said:

“(Turing) predicted in about 50 years time it will be possible to program computers to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than a 70% chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. It is at that point we would start deeming a machine’s performance as intelligent.”

The truth is we are at the 70%, if not higher, now. But go on the internet and you can find all the tech nerds and philosophical thinkers adamantly stating all the ways a computer is not human and cannot mimic a human and, in fact, it is not intelligent. Well. The issue is the majority of the world are not tech nerds and philosophical thinkers. To the majority of THAT world the computer is intelligent. In fact (an aside to all the tech nerds and philosophical thinkers), that imitation technology is more easily understood than the tech nerds and philosophical thinkers.

What this puts us at is what complexity theory calls The Edge of Chaos. This refers to the exploration zone of complex systems where interesting things happen. In this zone systems are not so rigid that they cannot change at all, but not so chaotic that they immediately dissolve into useless disorder. The edge of chaos is the fertile ground for possibilities to emerge. It describes where we live in today’s world. It is from this space where optimists thrive and progress towards something better can thrive.

It is time to explore.

I believe there about the same number of neurons in the brain as there are a number of stars in universe. We have used technology to explore space, to explore the brain, to explore the body, to explore the capacity of humans. Technology is the ship which can carry us to the farthest parts of the universe. My real fear and pessimism reside not with technology, but with ourselves – human beings. We have met the enemy and it is us. The truth is technology simply amplifies all the worst things of human beings. I’m not speaking of evil, although it lurks in the depths of the Internet, I’m speaking more about conformity. The internet defines how things should look like and scores of people line up to conform to that likeness. The same thing occurs with ideas and, well, everything. We are imitation machines. More access to all this information and imagery and words just simply encourages us all to become average, i.e., to all become the same. At some point we will all look like each other, speak like each other, and even use all the same words. That is my fear. My optimism resides in the belief that people are not average, they do like to be distinct, and they like progress to something new and better. Yeah. All progress is grounded in some spectacular risk, some spectacular mistake, or some spectacular idea that encourages everybody to zig while everyone else is zagging. And my optimism also encompasses technology because technology mirrors humanness.

Which leads me to end with a thought Pamela McCorduck had: “this thinking machine amplifier would amplify these qualities as other as other as other machines have amplified the other capacities of our body.” The development of AI continues to promise to provide an extension of the human capacities we value most like, well, conversations and exchanges and connections:

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“The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell — and to talk.

The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: “Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm.” “The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?” “Taste this apple. We won’t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today.” Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.”

Cluetrain Manifesto

Of course, there are reasons to be concerned especially when pondering latency – where effects are manifested long after the initiation of their cause – coupled with irreversibility, or a resistance to correction. Or the zero-infinity characteristic which refers to effects that are extraordinarily unlikely to occur, but catastrophic if they do.

Look. I am certainly not suggesting gambling our future on an optimistic point of view, just that optimism can shape the future we want. And I believe optimism is actually the only way to forge our way to a better future. Let’s go explore. Ponder.

A Human Algorithm: Flynn Coleman

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“Their most hopeful vision of the future is centred around compassion not convenience, emotional not artificial intelligence. The path towards this vision seems to require little technical innovation; it demands simply that people care about people – an idea so laughably naïve, yet so radically transformative.”

Kai

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• Preface: apologies to all my technology friends because I am going to mangle some technology concepts to make some points.

With all the talk about ChatGPT (large language models), which seems to bleed into a larger technology angst discussion, I thought it may be important to remind everyone about, well, humans.

The one thing smart machines and humans have in common is choicemaking. From there the paths diverge – fairly significantly.

A major difference between humans and computers is that at any given moment people are not choosing among all possible steps. What this means is when humans think of possibilities or ‘desired futures’ they are not even close to making the optimal choices. Instead, we, people, typically lean in on a deeply nested hierarchy of ‘knowns’ in our minds which we recognize as ‘better’ paths, or stepping stones, toward the future we desire. These nested ‘knowns’ are typically bounded biases (self-sealing beliefs). The self-sealing beliefs issues gets compounded by the fact we tend to pursue short term goals, or more immediate gratification/results, rather than maximizing for the future. We may think we are, and we may even may make valiant attempts to do so, but we are inevitably constrained by those pesky nested beliefs and shorter term gratification.

Which leads me to smart machines.

Given enough data a smart machine can recognize your self-sealed beliefs (even the ones you may have submerged fairly deeply). From there it can manipulate your nested beliefs which inevitably changes your view of future possibilities. We all have these nested beliefs, often called heuristic thinking, and they do help us navigate shit. That said. Because they are so embedded it’s difficult for us to see let alone reshape ourselves, but a computer can – sometimes incrementally over time and sometimes in one fell swoop. As you can imagine, this can be very good, and it can be very bad. And that is where this whole thing gets tricky. While we all have personal preferences, computers simply have data and the knowledge to see your preferences – but not understand them or the reasoning behind them – and smart machines are built with the purpose to modify human preferences because, well, smart machines modify human experiences. Preference modification is a slippery slope. It can modify good and modify bad and, well, machines are machines and without some intuition they may mathematically steer a preference away from a more optimal path – specifically to you – simply because the machine has assessed it to be so. This gets compounded by, quoting Brian Christian, “when a computer guesses, it is alarmingly confident.” Look. Machines will most likely make preference modification more statistically optimal (even weighing a 51% probability in a binary way), but the truth is some of the best preference driven choices people make are the less obvious ones. So maybe what I am suggesting is that ‘always optimal’ leads to a less-than-optimal destination. Yeah. Imagine that if everyone did what the computer said the entire world inches a bit closer to the mean (average) and runs the risk of eliminating the soaring heights attained in the improbable. And, if humans are anything, they are improbable machines.

Which leads me to how smart machines are both smart and dumb.

Machines do have an ability to learn at a variety of levels. At one level is repetitive task automation where the machine has been taught how to perform a specific task reliably, but its knowledge cannot grow any further based on its experience or in response to changing conditions. This is a closed loop system and typically very affordable. At another level the computer is able to observe the effects of its performance or results of its analysis and make adjustments to what it “knows”, usually by experimenting with other possibilities that might perform better. This sounds good and it is good, however, it can’t question anything because it doesn’t really have the ability to assess context awareness and learning. It cannot really question anything beyond any of the inputs it has been told to consider in its optimization. This is also a closed loop system just broader than the first that I outlined – a little less affordable.

This closed loop is important because far too many people talk about AI as being some omniscient thing, i.e., an open loop all-knowledge-encompassing process. It can be, but mostly it can’t because of cost. I cannot tell you how many times I have talked with a software developer about an AI/algorithm-based idea and they have responded “that is a great idea, but I don’t know anyone who would have the budget to build it.” What this means is ‘closed loop’ is also ‘budget-manageable.’

Anyway. A smart machine will end up being good at pattern recognition (assuming it has a large enough data base) and will be bad at intuitive sense. For example, machines “see” items as a patchwork of lines and dots and ones and zeros from which they identify things that match what they have in their database. But they cannot easily identify the essence of what item is. And even if a machine is able to successfully match an object to an image in its database, a slight change in perspective can baffle the shit out of a smart machine.

Our brains, however, are quite capable of taking different perspectives and variations into account. Our brains are subconsciously performing trillions of calculations. Basically, artificial intelligence is trapped in a closed loop. That loop can very large like large language models, but however vast they appear, alas, they are a closed loop. Brains, on the other hand, are an open system with nested loops inside. And this is maybe where common sense is not so common gets explained. Individual’s brains love residing in a nested loop. That nested loop of thinking is experience-based ‘data’ where the identification of what needs to be solved pops up as common sense. That said. The issue would be the same as a smart machine in that this heuristic thinking is a closed loop system which ignores additional information flowing in. That being said the brain is an open loop system and has the ability to be to be able to feed consistent additional information into any one of the closed nested loops within our brain, if we elect to permit it in.

“The fact that digital computers are able to outperform humans and performing some mental tasks should come as no surprise they were designed to do just that.”

University professor Phil Auerswald

Which leads me to the fact good decisionmaking is not always the optimal decision.

Good decision making has always been in the purview of humans. While we all bitch and moan about the lack of good decision making by certain people, the truth is the majority of us make good decisions most of the time. Or, maybe said, we make the best decision that we possibly can in the moment with the information that we have at hand. Which leads me to say people have learned to make the really hard decisions by first making a lot of easy ones. People gain skills and confidence from simple situation decisionmaking where it can be determined afterwards whether a decision was made well or not. So. If we were to allow smart machines to take over these ‘starter decisions’ and leave only the highly ambiguous situations for humans, there is a risk that effective decision making would be a less-than-optimal choice for humans to make. Yeah. They would just suck at decisionmaking. Yeah. If fewer people understand how to diagnose a decision because they’ve never had to run the gauntlet of all the easy ones, how would we be able to even assess whether a good decision has been made on the hard ones later on? I sometimes worry that we will find ourselves under a smart machine decision making autocracy by default in which less educated, or less concerned, decision makers automatically follow the decisions of smart machines. I’m not suggesting this will always be a bad thing. In fact it raises the possibility that a lot of good things happen faster. But it will only be a good thing until it’s not. Sometimes it will be a very very bad thing. And I worry we humans won’t know which is which. But then again, if we absolve ourselves of responsibility for all the easy decisions, aren’t we by default divesting humans from the hard decisions?

Here is what I know.

A smart machine will always make optimal choices. The best future is rarely, if not ever, found by making optimal choices. In fact, it’s the less-than-optimal choices that tend to foster the spectacularly-more-than-optimal results. And I tend to think humans are the best spectacular error and spectacular success machines in the world. Ponder.

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“No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. What I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph company.”

Alan Turing