The Complexity Bag
AI Stories for Digital Nomads
There are stories we tell ourselves. If enough people tell the same story it becomes something bigger, a history, legend or myth. It’s this myth that makes value, and creates containers for understanding and building even more social complexity.
AI is a tool and toolkit. It is something that befits the heroes of our times. Will it be perfect? Will it be without pains or problems? Probably not. Just like any magical item our task is to learn how to use AI models to benefit ourselves and to benefit those we love. How we love and who, that is what will determine how we train our AI and this will limit or expand the tools, the myths, the origin stories of the new age.
When I think of the stories of some heroes, I think of the world we inhabit both real and imagined. I think and look out of my mind’s eye at the world as a habitat, as a terrain, I think of a hero walking this world’s contours. I think not just of those I know but of the stories I don’t. I think of a migrant, a jet setter entrepreneur, of someone displaced by drought, war or fire. It jumbles but the truth is that all these stories exist. What do all of these stories require? Well, they require very flexible, powerful and adaptive toolkits.
Stories lead to something bigger than themselves and that is a culture and with that its myths. Myth is made of memes and made of the weaving together of tiny bits of experience, hope and desire. Myth is the material that forms a container for mysteries, paradoxes and for making apologies. Myth is the powerful engine of civilization because in myth comes all our reasons for persisting in the face of challenge. AI is part of our next human age’s creation myth because it is part of our current survival kit.
AI needs to hold some of what we loved the most so the next era doesn’t repeat some of our worst mistakes and patterns. The only way to bridge from one era to the next is to remember what was good and to remix or refashion it. As music and design and fashion show us, the return of a thought, a sound or a look is what we want, but we want it freshened up. We thrive with both reliability and novelty. We thrive when whole bits of culture are compressed into what is applicable in the here and now.
“Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.”
— Jaron Lanier
AI is both magical bag (archive) and a tool (task oriented). AI is both a tool and a container of tools. AI’s first function is to contain and its proof of concept is realized when it enables.
If all of society can identify and grow AI they believe in, it will help all of society function. In an information landscape and in any toolkit, trust is akin to reliability, to unflagging support and service. Systems are made of people and custom AI is also made by and for, people. AI is capable of taking existing information and making it appear as trusted wisdom. If a community can trust an archive, then this archive can help them complete more tasks and does in fact qualify as a wisdom repository. But is it really a repository or is it a mixer? Well, if it’s anything like my backpack things do get mixed up in there.
“Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they’re usually up to something.”
— Jaron Lanier
In the community I am in with the Design Science Studio we are global, so scattered geographically, yet we are united by resonance, by a desire to make this planet more livable, equitable and way more fun. Our Iris AI needs to serve this. We don’t need our AI to serve anyone but us, and if we do it correctly this will actually serve others. We understand our AI is both a wall and a bridge. We understand that it is both ours and something beyond ours, since we hope it becomes part of a legacy.
AI stores the things we want to know and saves them for when they become the things we need to know. With all the doom and gloom around the end of the human race as we knew it, there comes a reckoning. This reckoning does not need to be fatal, but it does signify a plot twist, one where the old ways don’t work, where the old beliefs harm instead of help. It’s at this point that the AI emerges, not as some savior, but as a tool, an element, a patch in the quilt that is progress and its story. AI presents itself as a tool when we see it as a nested piece in a system. We made this system, and AI can help us make sense of it so it helps us be, sensible.
Last little thing today. Did you know that AI is naturally a they? If it’s made by many sources and many people then all AI is naturally a they. Here’s another thing to consider, when I asked MidJourney to make these pictures for this post I had to ask it to make non-white people. I had to ask it to make its beautiful women more non-binary too. I had to work with the model to dig deeper into what we look like when we look at ourselves as we are emerging into the future.
Is it any wonder that we are more “they” than we were? even if we as indivduals use singular gender pronouns we are much more “they” than we used to be. We are this that and the other (roles) and we inherit who we are (identities) and no doubt we are our function (degrees, career, employment), but we are also something else in the way of a they. We are avatars. We are profiles. We are treasure troves mined by information scrapers. We are many things and beings in one. We too, are like archives and tools. We both hold history and take immediate action in a situation. We are mirrors of this technology. We humans are powerful even those of us without special “super” powers.
The they of AI is us. The they of trust is us. The mirror of how we adapt to our knowledge environment and how we use it to improve our existing analogue habitat is the one that everyone is debating and fearing. It’s like being scared of a mirror to be scared of AI.
Interaction is the gateway to a future we want to see. Training models that reflect who we are and who we trust is the knowledge of picking and choosing. Sharing our history and making it pop in accessible ways is our task.
If you need to debate this, remind yourself of the Superman story, the one where his parents send him off their dying planet to keep him alive. Remember that moment when the hero goes off to the isolated fortress and puts in the crystals and they produce for him a record of knowledge, vast and wide. Imagine that we must all do together what that one character did alone, because that is what we are charged to accomplish.
Scattered across the globe a new world awakens in every interaction with an interface. All around people move and merge themselves across old borders and forming new ones. It is here that we build and create our new story. It is here that the art of using technology becomes apparent. AI is made of us. We must make it for us too. Today we cross borders of words and thoughts and it is those border crossings of who we are and how we function that will become the bridges walked by the humans of the future. We must eject out of ourselves that which we want to save by sending that preciousness into new forms.
Next in this series I’ll bring you into our Iris Garden and share some of the experience of seeing an AI model go from database to training bot. Remember to follow speakerjohnash to learn more about Iris.
