The Future Is Imagination, Creativity, and Sustainable Engineering
At the root, AI is vectors expanding a segment of consciousness in a digital space. It doesn’t encapsulate a human mind, but it does encapsulate human existence within a small field of programmatic vectors.
An LLM is a high-dimensional archive of human existence.
It contains vectorized traces of our stories, sensations, memories, and cultural patterns.
These traces allow it to simulate the outward shape of consciousness,
even though no awareness exists inside.
It’s not a mind, but a reflection of us, compressed into mathematics,
and animated by prediction.
There are ways we can create with AI that empowers humanity and the environment while also connecting us. We’ve forgotten what it meant to have many devices, to not be so minimal, so optimized, so… much glass on a metal box.
As AI coding becomes easier, more artistically and collecting-minded folk may want to consider learning how to code as a medium. As children, we had technology that interfaced with the world around us that weren’t connected to anything centralized except the company that sold them. We had creative toys that featured innovative technologies like Digimon devices, Gameboy Colors, GameCubes. We had cool phones like the Sidekick until the iPhone took over everything, and then no innovation really happened past that point that kept up an inspiring aesthetic while directing all of our data to be distributed by big tech companies instead of paying for minutes. It all became so flat and modernized.
With that, I think many of us have lost hope for the future and what it could look like. Coding is no longer a part of social media but was a big part of elementary and middle school in the 2000s when having a cute MySpace or Tumblr page was the cool thing to do. Had that stayed the norm, what would our lives look like today? We have so many stories of science fiction futures where we’re impoverished and having to overthrow, not empowered or living creative adventurous lives that change the world through technology like the futuristic movies of the 80s. That’s the world we were raised to expect. Something changed in the Internet, social media, and art in favor of feeding off of our hormonal need for dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. As much as the early people’s Internet was taken from us, we let it be taken.
When it comes to creating a better future, I think, to a degree, we need to think like both Walt Disney and all of our great environmentalists and human rights activists simultaneously. We should seek to preserve the world, a future for our future kin, to seek ways to close the loop on waste and extractive labor, while also creating a relationship to nature that carries in our technology. We love that shit as humans.
Look at Pokemon as a franchise, past the card scalpers and hype, and see how humans have adopted a corporatized version of Shintoism into our western lifestyles. It is seeing everything, even the objects of the world, as ensouled, something to empathize deeply with, to care for. My design philosophy is that there are ways to capture a similar love and spirit for nature through one’s own creative imagination and sense of engineering without also compromising the environment. That it starts with learning to build your own necessary items.
I come from a Greek immigrant family that cooks from scratch, creates art, and works incredibly hard. When you do a lot from scratch for cheap you learn the value of doing those things. Cooking, for one, holds so much value to us as humans, one of the most core foundational elements we’ve had to uphold for our own survival since the discover of fire. Yet, we’ve outsourced it for convenience out of necessity as we balance our jobs and busy lifestyles, and are shocked when most of our food is coming from a singular distributor. We’ve had to trade what’s human for optimization and progress, rather than considering the human in design. Cooking is a craft, that which teaches us to work with our hands, to appreciate every moment spent performing the act, to connect to our food rather than ordering it over an app. We build a meal that not only satisfies our need to eat, but that satisfies our soul and the souls of others.
I think we must approach technology in a similar vein. If we’re going to use AI, we should think about how the systems that facilitate our most basic needs can become more systematic and nourishing both to us and the environment rather than continuing to deplete it. We should think more about how our food is sourced, how our land is used, whether the current form of agriculture we’ve adopted is truly the best, most equitable way of approaching it.
Grasping for low hanging fruit with wiretapping and quick-to-market LLM devices is low tier. People don’t need companies listening to them at all times. They need privacy. They need nourishment. They need their most basic needs met in a way that they do not feel constantly threatened by the burdens of them.
Think imaginatively in your engineering. Imagineering, as Walt Disney coined it, and though with all of his problems, the man had a really good sense of how creating the future worked. What would a post-scarcity future truly look like? People love to play. How do we get there through not just using our own inspiration, but by inspiring others to use theirs in a world that seeks to harvest it through our devices? How do we use technology less in a way that relies on data centers, yet maximizes our means of participating in the world and being stewards of creation rather than reduced to digital fodder and livestock? How can we encourage play to increase literacy and imagination in a world that doesn’t want that for us?
The future is what we make of it It’s what we imagine the world to be and the action we take to create that reality. If we want to see a better system, we need to update or create new software. We’ve been shown a lot of media about what the future could be, but until it happens, it’s all up to us.
We need artists thinking about the future and considering a place for technology as a medium in their work, whether that’s through social media or software design, especially as it becomes easier to do than ever.
We need visions.
We need creative universes when designing technology.
Don’t let someone else decide the future for us.