Touching the future: A story of systems, serendipity and grace

The future is not a destination. We are creating it every day now. This is perhaps a bold take on famed author and futurist William Gibson , who, when asked what the distant future would look like, replied that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. I often think about this quote from Gibson, wondering where the future might be lurking around me. It is helpful to have a glimpse of the future in the present. But I think it's better to actively build the future than to hope for a glimpse of the future. Or at least tell some stories about the future. These stories show one or more worlds we might want to live in—neither absurd nor utopian, but our own. I know we can still shape these worlds and turn them into places that reflect our humanity, our different cultures, and our concerns.

Of course, it’s not enough to tell some distant or unevenly distributed future stories, we also need to find ways to disrupt the status quo. Having a compelling and coherent vision for the future may not be as important as taking a proactive and thoughtful approach to building a possible future. Critical thinking is as important as critical action. One way to look to the future may be to focus less on the technological tools themselves and more on the broader systems necessary to realize these futures.

Today, there are many discussions about the future in which artificial intelligence (AI) takes center stage. Most of these discussions focus on the technical feasibility of artificial intelligence. But AI has always been more than just a combination of technologies. It exists as a series of discussions in which we all participate: we discuss AI, worry about its ethical framework, watch AI-themed films, read news stories about the impact of AI in Australia and abroad. AI is part of our cultural fabric. It’s also part of an increasingly complex set of systems — not so much one AI as multiple — that encompass everything from power grids and rail lines to mines, elevator shafts and food supply chains. These systems don’t just exist in our cultural imagination, they exist in the built worlds where they expend energy and energy.

How can we think differently about systems - technology, people, culture and country, and the place? This may require asking questions that are not readily available and cannot be easily answered. It may also involve touchstones from the past that help us understand the present, and even the future. After all, history may not provide answers, but it should allow us to ask better questions.

When I think about artificial intelligence, an image always pops into my mind. This is a black-and-white photograph from 1956, taken by a woman named Gloria Minsky ; she was accompanying her husband to a summer session at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire . The photo shows seven serious-looking, young white men resting on the lawn in front of an unremarkable building, including Nathaniel Rochester , John McCarthy , Claude Claude Shannon and Gloria's husband Marvin . The four are lead organizers of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence . This is the moment when artificial intelligence was born.

These people, all from elite American organizations, have different backgrounds and interests. Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories is considered the founder of information theory; Nathaniel Rochester designed IBM's first commercial scientific computer, the IBM 701. Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy were both fresh Ph.D. Minsky was a researcher at Harvard and built a very early neural network, while McCarthy was working on the theory of Turing machines and had close ties to John von Neumann , who Iman is the creator of ENIAC, the world's first stored-memory computer.

Together, they received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to hold a summer workshop exploring what they call "artificial intelligence ." By 1950s standards, the list of people to attend the conference was an interdisciplinary group with backgrounds in philosophy, mathematics, psychology, and the emerging fields of computer science. The conference also has significant backers, including governments (including the military) and industry. AI is not just an academic problem; it has been about business since the beginning.

The grant application lists the first framework for artificial intelligence:

…in theory, every aspect of learning, or any other characteristic of intelligence, could in principle be described so precisely that it could be simulated by a machine. We will try to figure out how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve various problems currently left to humans, and improve themselves.

( …every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. )

It was an ambitious agenda, but the expectation at the time was that computing would continue its remarkable growth, surpassing ENIAC and the IBM 701 (which gave the impression of limitless development in capability and potential). As a result, these early founders believed that much of their initial research agenda could be completed within a decade. It's impossible—and maybe that's a good thing.

Because their research agenda is missing several important resources and perspectives—namely, people, culture, and a sense of the wider world that AI might unfold. This is surprising because while AI may have been named and announced in 1956, many of its intellectual agendas were rooted earlier in discussions in the 1940s - some of which were developed by Dartmouth made by the convener. These discussions are framed by " cybernetics " and take a broader view of the technological world.

According to the definition of American mathematician Norbert Wiener , cybernetics is " the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine " . It is also the study of social and individual control and communication. In particular, for Wiener and others, it is the study of feedback mechanisms and circular causal systems , including in the emerging field of computing. In fact, the discussion of cybernetics has arisen from advances in computer architecture and performance, and the hope that this computing power will help unlock human potential in science and art. The idea was that cybernetics would inform new ways of decision-making and resource organization—new ways of being and behaving, new systems.

Wiener himself coined the term " cybernetics ", taking inspiration from the Greek word for "helmsman", "kybernetes", to illustrate his belief that the science of cybernetics would be the science of manipulation or control in the broadest sense.

It's about some kind of power. At the end of World War II, the power of computation—Wiener's "machine"—was evident, and its potential for scientific, political, economic, and social change seemed extraordinary. Theorizing about the relationship between machines and humans and the natural world feels very important and timely. Cybernetics is Wiener's framework for reconciling the relationship between humans and new machines, and the technological and other types of knowledge that will come from dealing with that relationship. For a period of time, it works. Scientific discoveries are aided by computers, as are new forms of commerce, automation and productivity.

Between 1946 and 1953, the Macy Conferences on cybernetics brought together thinkers from a variety of disciplines to discuss the concept of cybernetic systems to enhance human capabilities. Partly curated by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson , these sessions are fundamentally interdisciplinary and represent the construction of a new academic A body of knowledge and an attempt at a new discipline. They must have been extraordinary events: there were ten sessions in total, with topics ranging from mind control to memory, octopuses' consciousness, children's learning and development, the subconscious mind, technological systems, computation and abstract linguistics, and more. A thread that runs through many discussions is how we understand human cognition as some kind of system , and in particular, people's imagination, that helps determine whether computation will combine or match with it. What makes something smart, and how does it learn, communicate, and research? Here, we see the beginnings of the AI agenda.

From the discussions of these Macy's attendees, something important is worth asserting -- or re-asserting -- because while there's a lot of interest in how the brain works, there's also an understanding of the role of technology in our lives. Clear and deliberate review . At a time when the shadow of World War II was fading away, it was clear that computers would have a profound impact on our future, and Margaret Mead and her contemporaries were arguing about how to build a society that could accommodate people and cultures, Even the control system of the environment is annoying. The atomic bomb is a vivid reminder of the power of technology to profoundly change the natural world. Massey's attendees hope for a different technological future -- one that's far less disruptive, even though they're clearly unaware of the energy demands of the computer systems they're building, and their eventual cost.

The Massey Conference captured the public's attention as they spoke about the future of machines, where automation will create new jobs and new possibilities. Cybernetics is regularly featured in the mass media, with conversations and debates spilling over into the United States and around the world. Then, it seems to disappear.

In an interview years later, Margaret Mead reflects on these conversations and the power of interdisciplinary fusion to bring something new to the world. Sitting across the dining table with her then-ex-husband , Gregory Bateson , with a reel-to-reel recorder between them, she recalls:

There are mathematicians and physicists who are trained in the physical sciences and who are very, very precise about what they want to think about. There is a group of us anthropologists and psychiatrists who are trained and know enough about group psychology so we know what's going on and can use it or ban it. And then there are two or three gossipers in the middle, who are very simple people with a lot of loose intuition and no discipline about what they're doing. In a sense, this was the funniest conference I've been to because no one has figured out how to handle this yet. —For God's Sake, Margaret (1976)

I always thought Mead was referring to the various people at the Macy's meeting, and she said no one has figured out how to handle this yet. But perhaps Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand heard more. Whole Earth Catalog - an excellent compendium of material culture and how-tos from the 1960s and 1970s - is about imagining a different world and a different future. As the name suggests, it starts with the entire Earth. Brand, through his catalogue and his actions, will re-ignite the cybernetics discussion for the next generation. The next wave of cybernetics will continue to be about computing and the future of humanity, and it will also focus more and more attention on broader ecological dimensions.

In 1956, at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project , McCarthy and his colleagues had speculated that intelligent computers would have the ability to act creatively and possibly generate new art forms. This undoubtedly builds on McCarthy's early cybernetic imagination, as well as other intersections of technology, culture, and design. But Dartmouth's AI quickly focused on strategy, reasoning, language, and more.

Yet more than a decade after Dartmouth, on the other side of the Atlantic, a brilliant woman curated her first major exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London , which brought the The future brings into a very different framework and brings the broader future into view again. It took Jasia Reichardt three years, and through pressure, travel, exchanges, and some funding from IBM and the U.S. State Department, to complete the exhibit. The exhibition, which she called " Cybernetic Serendipity ," showcased the work of 325 participants from Europe, North America and Japan. Boeing, General Motors, Westinghouse, Bell Telephone Laboratories, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory are represented, with artists Bridget Riley and Ulla Wiggen , radical composer John John Cage , and others whose work lacked a specific definition, such as Gordon Pask , one of Wiener's disciples, and Nicholas Negro, who later founded the Media Lab at MIT Ponte ( Nicholas Negroponte ) .

The exhibition features digital music, lighting, poetry, sculpture - all created through computers. Throughout the summer of 1968 , as many as 60,000 people roamed the spacious hall. In more than 600 square meters of space, they might encounter a brief history of cybernetics, next to a drawing robot, or a demonstration computer in the shape of an elephant sponsored by Honeywell, aptly Named " Peripheral Pachyderm " . In addition, there are works by Korean-American new media artist Nam June Paik , computer-generated music and film, wireframe graphic representations of Boeing, Gordon Pask 's reaction installation "Motion Conversations" ( Colloquy of Mobiles ) , and a photosensitive owl.

It's unlike anything before, it just opens up the world little by little.

Amid the light, noise and spectacle, there is a series of prints made by computer programs and printed on large plotters. One of the pieces, called " Return to Square ," is probably the most wonderful thing I've ever seen a computer make, and certainly the most wonderful thing made using Fortran, an early IBM programming language. It features a square that slowly turns into the silhouette of a woman and then back to a square again: simple and striking.

This piece is from an artist collective calling itself CTG ( Computer Technique Group ) , and they are the only Japanese exhibitors participating in Cybernetic Serendipity. CTG was established in 1966, with the earliest members including Masao Komura and Kunio Yamanaka . " Return to Square " was derived from an idea by Komura, and the Fortran programming was done by Yamanaka. It was printed on a Calcomp drum plotter at the IBM Scientific Data Center in Tokyo.

CTGs are known as radicals, electro-hippies and even new samurai who create new forms of graphic art, digitally produced poetry and computer-generated music, all of which are sent to the "Cybernetic Serendipity". This is an appropriate combination because the creative process used by CTG is based on a combination of "cybernetic" generation of patterns and "accidental" randomness . CTG clearly has its own cybernetic vision: a relational vision involving humans and society, rather than a purely technological vision. In October 1967, their manifesto appeared in the outline of the "Computer and Art symposium" held in the Great Hall of Tama Art University, stating their point:

We're going to tame the computer's enchanting charisma and limit it to serve a given power. This stance is a solution to complex problems in a machine society. We neither praise nor criticize machine civilization. By collaborating with artists, scientists, and other creative people from all backgrounds, we'll take a closer look at the relationship between humans and machines, and how we should live in the computer age.

(We will tame the computer's appealing transcendental charm and restrain it from serving established power. This stance is the way to solve complicated problems in the machine society. We do not praise machine civilization, nor do we criticise it. By a strategic collaboration with artists , scientists and other creative people from a wide variety of backgrounds, we will deliberately carefully [sic] the relationships between human beings and machines, and how we should live in the computer age.)

This stance is perhaps unsurprising, considering that the founding members were students of architecture, product design and engineering at a time when the Japanese student movement was at its peak. CTG stayed together for just over three years, during which time they pushed computing (further) into the realm of creativity and art.

After London, "Cybernetic Serendipity" was boxed with other works and sent to Washington, D.C., to be installed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art . From there, a small group headed to San Francisco to help Frank Oppenheimer start his new science museum , the Exploratorium . Fifteen years later, he called the "Cybernetic Serendipity " "the most important beginning of our place. It really laid the groundwork for what we wanted to do because it combined perception, art in a wonderful way." , technology and science are combined." ( a most important beginning for our place. It really set the stage for the kind of work we wanted to do because it combined perception, art, technology and science in a wonderful way. ) The exhibition is in It opened in the last months of 1969 and closed before New Years.

To this day, the head of John Billingsley 's robot, Albert, guards the building's entrance. And the influence of this exhibition still holds a special place in the way we imagine the past, and in how the past imagined different futures.

This isn't the first time San Francisco people have been exposed to the concept of cybernetics, or the first to see a future where technology and human life might coexist. This isn't even the first time art has been used to evoke the future of this technology. Two years before Cybernetic Serendipity arrived in San Francisco, Richard Brautigan wrote a poem about the future that is still circulating today. By the late 1960s, he was already a noted West Coast poet, writer of short stories and fiction. He often writes about the natural world and the relationship of humans to this world. But this poem combines technology and nature, and it spreads more widely. In particular the verse of the same name - " all watched over by machines of loving grace " - became Silicon Valley folklore, appearing in various histories of Silicon Valley and its founders.

My copy of this poem was torn from a manual. You can still see the vague imprint of the tech spec chart, which unfolds in typography:

I'm fantasizing,

(Hopefully the sooner the better)

an automated meadow,

there,

animals and computers,

In mutual programming,

harmonious coexistence,

like clear water,

Reflect the blue sky.

I'm fantasizing,

(At this moment!)

an automated forest,

full of pine trees and electronic components,

The deer roam leisurely,

walk past the computer,

It seems that it is a wild flower,

Gorgeous bloom.

I'm fantasizing,

(must be!)

an automated ecosystem,

where we need no labor,

Back to nature,

Back to our animal brothers,

loving machine,

Take care of everything.

Is this a prayer from 1967? Is this a hopeful plea to future creators? A year later, the world wasn't seeing spinning flowers, but in a live presentation at the joint annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in San Francisco, The future flashes again. For 90 minutes, Stanford Research Institute (SRI) electrical engineer Doug Engelbart and his team, which includes Whole Earth Catalog Stuart Brand as photographer, will present a set of Technology called " on line computing " - including word processing, version control, file link structures, real-time collaboration, hypertext, graphics, windows, and the mouse. Rather than building artificial intelligence, Engelbart was very interested in how computing could enhance human intelligence and collaboration; he built the personal computer we know now to help us understand that distinction.

At that moment, the future of computing suddenly became clear, and to the nearly a thousand people who had gathered in the room that day, it was a future they wanted to live in. You can still watch the demo online now ( The Mother of All Demos ) - past present and future, right there.

On October 26, 1969, the American telephone company AT&T connected two computers—one at Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the other at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), about 570 kilometers apart on the west coast, The future appeared again. At UCLA, they started typing the word "login" and asked the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to report the occurrence of each letter.

"Do you see the L?" (Do you see the L?)

"Yes, we saw L."

"Did you see O?"

"Yes, we see O."

Then UCLA entered the letter G and the system crashed. Somehow, fittingly, this was the beginning of the Internet.

In San Francisco, "Cybernetic Serendipity" was held at the Exploratorium; I imagine Doug Engelbart went there to see another future.

More than fifty years have passed since the Cybernetic Serendipity and the Internet collided in California, and the world has been built from that intersection, from the imaginations, silences, and visions of those gathered there. Many of us have lived in those worlds and rightly ask many questions about them.

For me, I've lived at that crossroads in Silicon Valley for almost 30 years, most of it in companies born in 1968 and 1969. The cybernetic grasslands and forests that Richard Brautigan imagined did not materialize, and the machines now watching over us seem to lack the grace of love. The artificial intelligence promised in 1956 did not emerge, nor did the technological revolution lead us to go beyond or see things from a global perspective. According to a 2018 news feature by Nicola Jones for Nature ( How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world's electricity ), data centres around the world consume more than 200 terawatt hours of electricity each year, which is More than the combined electricity consumption of some countries and 1% of global electricity demand. The same report estimates that the entire ICT ecosystem - "including personal digital devices, mobile phone networks and televisions" - produces emissions equivalent to 2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the international aviation industry. What about the internet? OK, enough said. But I was still haunted by those early possible futures, and the worlds people imagined. And now, as we rethink how we build the future, I want to know what our touchstones and reference points are.

When I returned to Australia in 2017, I wanted to build other futures and acknowledge that this country was where my work started and where I am now working again. I knew I needed to find a different world and a different intersection, new ways to tell stories about technology and the future - I wanted some different pasts and some different touchstones.

The first time I saw pictures of Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps was in a Guardian news article ( The fish traps at Brewarrina are extraordinary and ancient structures. Why aren't they better protected? ), this photo stuck in my head. That black-and-white photo from the late 19th century shows the long arcs of grey stone on a fast-moving river. The water flow around the stone turned white at the breakpoint. Although there are no people in the photo, the arrangement of the stones is thought out, contrived, and enduring. This is a photo of the oldest known human-built technological system on Earth. While there is still debate about its exact age -- 4,000, 10,000, 40,000 years -- there is no debate about its complexity or sophistication.

It was December 2018, a familiar Australian summer day - hot, windy and relentlessly dry - and I found my way to the banks of the Barwon River, near the NSW-Queensland border in Ngemba ) Man's land, I'm going to visit fishing traps. The ground was hard, dry, and very brown: we were still in a drought in 2018. There were no signs or directions, no sign of the importance of where I was. It also doesn't look quite like the photo, the water is slightly salty and slow-flowing, and the weeds are surprisingly green, blocking the river.

But you can still see the curved stone nets extending from the modern concrete cofferdams - and the scale of the project is very large. This is a much scaled-down version, considering that many of the stones were dug out of the river bed, put into the foundations of nearby buildings, or cleared out to make room for boating. But you still have to marvel at the scale and wonder where the stones came from and how they all moved here, how long did it take to build this, why the Australian engineering we studied in school and It is not mentioned in the history of technology.

These stone-built fishing traps are undoubtedly the oldest and largest systems of their kind in Australia. Local traditional owners and managers call them Ngunnhu, and their pattern was revealed to his sons by an ancestor named Baiame. Generations of Aboriginal people have arranged the stones in loose curves and stretched along the channel, mimicking fishing nets, trapping fish in stone containers at various heights in the channel. There are also stone fences for keeping fish large and small in clear, cool water. It is a meeting place, a place where multiple different indigenous peoples meet, where rituals, rituals and knowledge are established and shared. It remains an important and special place where local indigenous communities continue to fish where possible. These fishing traps were added to the NSW Heritage List in 2000 and the National Heritage List in 2005. Standing on the banks of the Barwon River, I began to think that the importance of this place is not in the fishing traps themselves. It is the systems these traps create, and the systems in which they are embedded. This is a system created and preserved over thousands of years. It is a system that requires concerted and sustained effort. It's a multi-generational effort that requires accumulating both knowledge about how the environment works, hydrology and fish, and a commitment to continually build, maintain, and upgrade this system.

Technological, cultural and ecological factors underpin the importance of this place not only as a heritage site, but as a knowledge base on which contemporary systems can be built. Ideas about sustainability; ideas about systems over decades or centuries; ideas about systems that persist and that are clearly established. The systems built to ensure cultural continuity feel like the kind of systems we might want to invest in right now. It feels like the outline of the future story we want to tell.

To date, I have spent a significant part of my career in Silicon Valley, where the stories of the future and technology of the past are recreated, many fragments of the past are erased, rewritten or simply forgotten, and the stories of the future have been tell.

Now, we need to create a different story about the future. This story focuses not only on technologies, but also on the systems in which those technologies reside. The opportunity to focus on the future of having these systems — and the current approach to them — feels both huge and acute. It feels especially important in this socially and ecologically ambiguous, disorienting, and deeply disturbing time that we may need to disrupt the way we are now. Now that our connection to the future seems to be off the rails of past decades, we have an opportunity to reform. Ultimately, we need to think differently, ask different questions, engage different types of people in the process, and look holistically and critically at the many propositions that computing, especially advanced technologies, raises .

For me, the Brewarrina Fish Traps are a powerful way to frame how current technological systems should and could be unfolding. They represent a very different future, one that we can glimpse in the present and the past, a future that always is and always will be. At this moment, we need to be reminded that stories about the future—about AI, or any kind of stories—are not just about technology; they are about people, and where those people find themselves , those places they might call home, and the systems that bind them all together.

Original: Touching the future—Stories of systems, serendipity and grace , by Genevieve Bell