The Magical Backpack of AI
Complexity tools for the win
Before I started on this current AI adventure with the Design Science Studio and Speaker John Ash I had been imagining ways of bridging the world of our dreams with the world of our actions. I have an app known as Dream Tree, on the shelf right now, waiting for its moment to do just that. Maybe it will get made, maybe it won’t. But while it waits, my journey continues. And when I journey, I take a backpack.
In fact, here’s the thing: I have been imagining this “magical backpack” with friends for years and now by adding the Carrier Bag theory to this practice, everything falls into place.
I don’t know about baskets. I have little space for cute clutches unless I am attending some very special event, and even then, there is probably a backpack of mine lurking nearby. It’s in the car or the hotel room, or somewhere, waiting to hold the big, little, the sundry pieces of life.
When I imagined a magical world with a friend, one that would both support the player and citizen science, I never imagined popping out all my tools from a clutch. Maybe that’s more miraculous, a magical handbag, but I have never lived that kind of privilege. I have never had a space where all I ever needed was containable in some small bag. I have always been a person, a woman, who needed more than a lipgloss and a phone. I have always needed various gadgets like small knives, lighters, pack towels and the like.
Why does that matter?
AI is a tool: nothing more and nothing less. AI is a way of meeting the demands of the terrain of our day. What’s our terrain? It’s knowledge based. What’s our terrain’s shape? It varies constantly. AI allows us to meet the demands of the moment. What’s the biggest problem of AI in the short term? It’s the old paradigm.
Most big business people want AI and robots in place so that they can replace human workers. Yet, what we are seeing is that these AI tools work best when they assist but do not seek to replace human beings in the workplace. AI tools help us rise in complexity and that is their point. The people who want to turn AI tools into their very own realm of power are missing the opportunity and poisoning our understanding of what we actually need for this new planet Earth.
Our planet is no longer simple. It has passed out of its baby days. To AI or not to AI isn’t an option. To AI intelligently and with distributed nodal modeling is key. To AI regressively is to concentrate its development and reach without community input. AI is part of the magical world we call Earth.
Do you want to game this world without the best tools? Do you want to try and discover the magic of the next age while holding a stupid clutch, wearing footwear designed hundreds of years ago, to torture your every step? Let that go. Let the experts and their warnings go.
We are the new indigenous peoples of planet earth. We are the ancestors of the future and for us, magical backpacks are the containers we need. Inside of these our complexity tools are stored. Inside of these backpacks are the tools of weaving and fashioning, waiting at the ready to make us up to the task of a new planet.
The Carrier Bag theory of evolution imagines that before we poked and prodded we gathered. We have returned to the gathering stage of a new age. We don’t want to start that age regressing. We want to take all the best tools of the past, and to integrate them with the tools of the moment. Together they’ll take us into the future. Without these tools we will be led, corralled, and forced into futures that do not fit us.
When you imagine another world would or could you ever believe it would exist without advanced computing machines? Is your perfect world one without running water, electricity or lights? I find that doubtful. Don’t let the naysayers take you backwards. Sure, we’re in a spiral of times. We are in some ways back at civilization level of beginning again, but we have the tools to match the times. We also know that those who “rule” the world now would rather place collars of obedience on those they pay, rather than find a way to work with them in a whole new paradigm. Douglas Rushkoff told us this ages ago and we would be smart to listen.
I want a magical backpack because it fits me and it fits the times. And inside that special kit of survival tools I want AI to help me and others like me do well. We sit at the intersection of two paradigms and I choose the next level path, one where magical thinking and new technology enable the world we know is possible.
