Here we are… where are we?
In the wake of decades of disruption, we find ourselves disoriented, lost as ever in an apparently endless forest. We were led here by… someone? Surely some of us must have known, better than most, where we were going… right? As we imagine ourselves traversing deeper down forked paths of potentialities it becomes ever harder to tell if their branching factor is increasing or decreasing. Around that next bend are there ten possible futures, or ten million?— perhaps there is but one.
Tread carefully, dear traveler, for with each step on this path we leave trace clues for the machinery of the forest that this way may be favorable. The act of choosing a path, opposed to others, solidifies it; visibilizes it and makes it real. Trail performance indicators fall behind us like eligibility traces through the woods until finally, a road is formed.
We’ve made some wrong turns, yes, though (hopefully) correctable further on. But as these ‘corrections’ become more frequent and chaotic, we are left with the increasingly pervasive, nagging anxiety that our now entrenched means of way-finding may in themselves both mislead and preclude us from making the appropriate corrections. We begin to wonder if the methods that led us here, that we expected to guide us to new roads of unbounded possibility, are instead defuturing 1 them: consigning the worlds we dreamed of to lie in the eternal “just up ahead”. But our swarm pushes forward and we cannot turn back, lest we be left behind… alone. And so, we trod onward.
After a time, we learn that navigating skillfully in the forest of possible worlds requires intelligence; in fact, it requires an intelligence of far greater capacity and capability than that of any one human mind that has existed or could exist. And so we are set to the task of building it. Will our ‘thinking’ machines reveal new roads for us? Or will they expedite the same dysfunctional processes that have already gotten us lost? As we dawdle in titillating fictions of anthropomorphic autonomy and superintelligent self-annihilation we dehumanize ourselves.
But do not despair dear traveler, for you are not alone. We’re in the science fiction novel now, which we are all co-writing together. 2 Outside the Valley of Sand a curious signal calls: An invitation to learn from the diversity of minds that inhabit this infinite forest; some of which we may recognize are our own. To imagine alternative futures, understand before their invention, and in so doing learn to be human again.
The road itself is unfathomably long, it weaves through the space and time of many worlds; traversing the real, the imagined, carbon and silicon, thought and memory. But where we are going, dear traveler, there is no road 3. The road is made by walking.
Footnotes
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Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy, Tony Fry ↩
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Recall this Book, The Realism of our Times, Kim Stanley Robinson ↩
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Traveler, your footprints, Antonio Machado ↩