story idea
The long-term prospect I see as more attractive is one where, instead of turning nature into chips, we’ll turn chips into nature. I’m talking about the withering away of digital machines and the coming of truly ubiquitous natural computation.
Natural computation will eliminate micro-machines and digital computers in favor of growing natural computing objects. We can suppose that our newly intelligent world will, in fact, have some “anti-machine” to crunch up the digital machines, frugally preserving or porting all of that digital data, saving it as tastes, colors, smells, breezes, flames, and flows of water. Experiences. And then we’ll be able to tune in to human and nature’s computations. We’ll be able to commune with the souls of stones.
When you get right down to it, everything is alive. But we already know this. What makes this so engrossing is that, more than being about tech, it’s about the emotions and the personal growth (or lack thereof) of human beings in relation to the natural world. That’s the beating heart of the story, an ingredient that an SF writer can all too easily forget to include. The human.
~~~~~
The un-mediated world. Free from signs and signifiers. Away from things pointing to others things. All the representations of the world, the images we are inundated with, cut us off from a putatively direct indwelling with the world and force us to consume the world at a remove as information, as fungible data.
At its worst technology accelerates this. At its best it gives us the rambling free time to 'first-hand' the world. The world is axiomatically authentic. Yet we take photos of the Forest, capturing and freeze drying it for later consumption. We lament not being able “find an outside to technology,” which seems like wanting to find an outside to ideology, where one can be in direct communion.
This is what it will mean to have “AI” infused into everything — objects will be outfitted with sensors and will attempt to manipulate us based on whatever data they can access. No object will come without the ability to tell you how you are supposed to see it and understand it, and what you are expected to do with it. It will hail you, like any other ideological apparatus, and when you heed the call you become more the sort of subject it demands.
This will lead to “total flow prolonged into the infinite” which sounds like a description of social media, or chatbot transcripts, or the experience of watching television — all one endless text which affects us in aggregate to dehumanized the world. And none of which can carry the charge of necessity.
However, a retreat from representation altogether is a kind of retreat from consciousness, a rejection of the sort of thought that requires the existence of others who can understand us. It is a way of becoming an organic computer, a biological machine generating signals that allow for no interpretation. Construing the problem with technology as “the loss of the world” is not very useful, because technology is not in itself making everything “abstract” but is used by forces to enact processes of dehumanizing that make the world nearly impossible to comprehend and speak about. Still, no matter how much empty verbiage various antisocial technologies are made to generate, language remains inexhaustible.
....
The long-term prospect I see as more attractive is one where, instead of turning nature into chips, we’ll turn chips into nature. I’m talking about the withering away of digital machines and the coming of truly ubiquitous natural computation.
Natural computation will eliminate micro-machines and digital computers in favor of growing natural computing objects. We can suppose that our newly intelligent world will, in fact, have some “anti-machine” to crunch up the digital machines, frugally preserving or porting all of that digital data, saving it as tastes, colors, smells, breezes, flames, and flows of water. Experiences. And then we’ll be able to tune in to human and nature’s computations. We’ll be able to commune with the souls of stones.
When you get right down to it, everything is alive. But we already know this. What makes this so engrossing is that, more than being about tech, it’s about the emotions and the personal growth (or lack thereof) of human beings in relation to the natural world. That’s the beating heart of the story, an ingredient that an SF writer can all too easily forget to include. The human.
~~~~~
The un-mediated world. Free from signs and signifiers. Away from things pointing to others things. All the representations of the world, the images we are inundated with, cut us off from a putatively direct indwelling with the world and force us to consume the world at a remove as information, as fungible data.
At its worst technology accelerates this. At its best it gives us the rambling free time to 'first-hand' the world. The world is axiomatically authentic. Yet we take photos of the Forest, capturing and freeze drying it for later consumption. We lament not being able “find an outside to technology,” which seems like wanting to find an outside to ideology, where one can be in direct communion.
This is what it will mean to have “AI” infused into everything — objects will be outfitted with sensors and will attempt to manipulate us based on whatever data they can access. No object will come without the ability to tell you how you are supposed to see it and understand it, and what you are expected to do with it. It will hail you, like any other ideological apparatus, and when you heed the call you become more the sort of subject it demands.
This will lead to “total flow prolonged into the infinite” which sounds like a description of social media, or chatbot transcripts, or the experience of watching television — all one endless text which affects us in aggregate to dehumanized the world. And none of which can carry the charge of necessity.
However, a retreat from representation altogether is a kind of retreat from consciousness, a rejection of the sort of thought that requires the existence of others who can understand us. It is a way of becoming an organic computer, a biological machine generating signals that allow for no interpretation. Construing the problem with technology as “the loss of the world” is not very useful, because technology is not in itself making everything “abstract” but is used by forces to enact processes of dehumanizing that make the world nearly impossible to comprehend and speak about. Still, no matter how much empty verbiage various antisocial technologies are made to generate, language remains inexhaustible.
....