Refresh

thanks to StockSnap for the image

I’m restarting this blog as a conversation with the future. 

Robots and Me was always speculative – possible robots as well as possible me – but turbulence in my personal life and a lack of ground-breaking developments in AI or robotics made for distraction and neglect: a number of posts got stuck in draft; a greater number never made it that far.  I thought about writing more, but none of those thoughts ever seemed urgent, important or even interesting.  All my energies were focused on getting through the present, a present I thought might be challenging but was at least predictably stable.

As it was, up until a couple of weeks ago.

Now I feel like I’m spending my days spooling unsatisfactorily between the vaporisation of a world I never questioned, and an unprecedented, unmapped and uneasy future.  I’m looking for ways to deal with – by which I mean work with and work through – social isolation, economic shutdown, existential dread and a pandemic that’s under-tracked and spreading rapidly via everything we touch and the very air that we breathe.  By talking through observations, ideas, questions and fears, I hope that we can together find a way to get clarity on what matters, what’s changing and what we can do now to lay the foundations for a surer and better future.  That process of shared enquiry seems to me the likeliest to result in the psychological safety the experts tell us is the foundation of all work-related satisfaction, and I think it might be fun and fulfilling in and of itself.

Especially as we’re not the only ones involved in this change-management conversation... 

Homo sapiens is now a cyborg.  

Apart from interactions with my grumpily housebound children and the odd fleeting and park-bench-length encounter with shopkeepers and delivery workers, everything I do, say, learn and think is channelled through silicon-based extensions to my fingers, my ears, my mouth.  And the same is true for the other humans I’m interacting with.

It’s too early to know what this means, or what the implications are for each of us personally or for society as a whole.  But this augmented reality, blending silicon with flesh, is a subject that grips me and seems worthy of another punt at a blog.

I’ll leave you to get on with your busy lives in a sec, but I wanted to end this refresher post with one question, not based on observation so much as feeling, perhaps nothing more than a hunch:

Is tech taking over some of the sensuality we’ve always thought of as specifically human?

A few recent experiences come to mind: talking on the phone and having the conversation morph from habitual perky information-exchange to something more like the intimacy and vulnerability of secrets whispered across a pillow in the dark.  Group chats that are busier and more trivial than before – the virtual equivalent of water cooler bantz.  Video conferences with a focus and energy I never remember.  As for social and mainstream media, I’m finding them less of a check-in than a constant companion, less smart morsels for dinner parties and more the stuff that dreams, and nightmares, are made on.

Perhaps this sensual shift into augmented reality is nothing more than shock-response, like the muskily-sweet flowers and sobbing crowds thronged outside Buckingham Palace in the days following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.  

Or perhaps this is a change in what it means to be human as fundamental as our ancestors’ response to the world-shattering eruption of the Toba super-volcano 75,000 years ago?  In the almost-decade of volcanic winter that is thought to have followed the eruption, global temperatures dropped by up to fifteen degrees; ash deep enough to come up to your ankle covered South-East Asia; plants, trees and animals died in unprecedented quantities; and the number of humans on earth fell to fewer than ten thousand, perhaps as few as one thousand. 

What brought us out of that near-extinction was cooperation, probably based on radical adaptation in our capacity for complex language.  Those humans who survived to be our ancestors, the theory goes, were those who could represent a strange and challenging world in words, who could share detailed information about scarce resources, who could hoodwink rival groups and build clan resilience, identity and purpose through dialectical problem-solving and shared stories and myths.

I’m not claiming that this blog is going to save readers from Covid19 or the strains of rebuilding a crashed economy, but communication and collaboration can only help us now and in the future.

It’s great to be back in touch, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.