Why do we need eleven fingers?
No.138: Tue 28?Mar?2023
Hi, it’s David here.
This week our US CSO, Tom Donohue, shares his thoughts with us having been to SXSW and done all the things you do in Austin.
His observations remind me of the importance of keeping human intelligence in the mix when we look at the wonderful world of the artificial.
I have recently finished John Bridle’s seminal book,?Ways of Being?(highly recommend), where he invites us to look at what he calls ‘the more than human world’ as a way of understanding our place in the wider ecosystem that spans from Nature to AI.
As always, we are curious to hear what you think.
David Alberts (Co-Founder and Chief Vision Officer?at BeenThereDoneThat)
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Hi, it's Tom here.
Despite my all too frequent failure to pick out all the pictures with traffic lights, I am fairly sure I am not a robot.
I am a human, blessed with opposable thumbs, sophisticated linguistic abilities, and perhaps the most human gift of all, an imagination.?
As I returned to the mountains from SXSW, I left thinking about imagination a lot.?
Is it under threat from our robot overlords???
Where is it needed most?
Why does it feel a bit lacking this year? And how might we go about refinding it?
As the NFT bros of last year slunk back to their digital caves, to presumably cook up a new ponzi scheme, in their place at SXSW this year came the Generative Ai acolytes.?
I have to confess my ‘this changes everything’ fatigue was in full force before the fact. That, coupled with a reactionary defensiveness to what is potentially a career, industry and civilisation ending foe, left me in a state of skepticism with a frisson of fear.?
If Ai is able to sift through the entirety of human knowledge and content in increasingly clever ways, and generate answers at the speed of fiber optics… What room is there for us strategic and creative connectors of dots? Are we going to outsource imagination? Are we just destined to be all drooling NPCs in Skynet’s evil game?
The short answer based on what I gleaned is no (though don’t tell the robots I said that). As I threw myself into a few choice panels and talks, some light was shone and some hope restored. It’s going to be a weird few years to be sure. But our imagination is more needed now than ever.?
That’s because Ai is only as good as its imaginative prompts and provocations, and its outputs are only as good as our imaginative interpretation. When everyone has access to Ai, how you frame the problem for it to address will be the competitive advantage.?
As Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed noted in his talk, it’s a human centric tool, it’s like us, messy, creative, it makes mistakes. We humans are the prompters, the framers, the interpreters, it’s up to us to get inspired and bring the imagination to the party.
Which is precisely what media artist and researcher Yoichi Ochiai is doing with Japan New Islands, using Ai tools and blending with ancient Japanese customs and practices. While creating powerful and moving art, he’s also developing a narrative that suggests we find ways to harmonize with our new digital nature. This again exemplifies the need to our agency and our culture at the heart of the act of imagination. Accepting our reality, but owning our ability to push it forward.
So what of imagination more broadly? Maybe it’s just me but large hotel conference ballrooms that look like the wedding venue for a distant Trump cousin, don’t immediately make me feel my most imaginative. And perhaps the world at large isn’t feeling that imaginative either…
领英推荐
In this article, Alex Murrell very accurately points out that things are getting incredibly, tragically uniform. For me that suggests it is time to reimagine or retire.?
As the very astute Rohit Barghava pointed out in his fabulous talk at SXSW, ‘15 Non-Obvious Trends Shaping Our Future Normal’, “The only future we can make is the one we can imagine”.?
His thoughts about psychedelic cures, instant learning, x-ray contacts and our microbiome started to restore a little imagination in me.?
The wave of optimism grew with another talk The Power of Provocation: Liberating Creativity from the good people over at Frog. Their call is to ask ourselves the bigger questions, take a lateral look at our categories. Overcoming our presumptions and limitations, with the right provocations, so that we’re ultimately making choices as a business that are about pursuing pleasure and positivity, not just about avoiding pain.?
All of which brings me to the conclusion that imagination is needed now more than ever, and that starts asking the right questions, framing up the right provocations and problems, and putting non-normal creation back on the agenda. Sounds like a business I know…. Now I’m off to go and ask the doctor why I have 11 fingers.
Tom Donohue (Chief Strategy Director at BeenThereDoneThat.)
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Aloha David. Too long time no connect.