The Shed

Painting and Picture by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

It is my belief that we have not been led by technology; rather, technology has been led by us. I do not know how to explain or to prove this, and so this piece of writing explores a very simple and naïve attempt to explore this is a possibility. I do this for one reason. It seems to me that a great many of these corporations of innovation and technology that I have been speaking about have been making business plans for our future and then rushing us toward those plans. And I do not believe that they are entitled to do this, but are simply taking advantage of the natural confusion we feel in the face of sudden and powerful change.

Those business plans appear to include the intellectual property of those futures and the power to restrict us to those futures. This is not such a naïve idea. Recently Apple announced its new educational future. Apple’s Future of Education is hardware that will govern the way information will be accessed (ipads), software that will govern what this information will look like (apple text-developing software), service that will governs the accessibility of this information (the apple store) and permission that will govern who is able to make it. It’s not a small thing. This is the first time that education worldwide can be centrally controlled. Whether it will be or not is not up to us, but to Apple. Should Apple choose, for example, to provide the hardware free for the initial setup, the offer will be accepted by a large majority of institutions. Locking them into a relationship with Apple for equipment replacements and upgrades, software and upgrades, educational texts and upgrades, and ongoing entry to the system.

I’m trying here not to go back to a discussion of specific technological examples, but it is difficult. It may seem, as Emmjay pointed out, “driven by the interplay between innovation and consumption in what we loosely call an “open market””. But the “interplay between innovation and consumption” can still be considered a technological interchange, and what I am trying to argue is that any kind of technological interchange is being quickly claimed as intellectual property by corporations. Not just that, but our very behaviour and characteristics are being claimed as intellectual property – and by projection, our future is being claimed as intellectual property. Which might also lead to the deliberate narrowing down of the possibilities of our future. And it seems to me that before we find ourselves in legal quicksand we – the human race – might want to re-establish our ownership of these things.

I’m going to introduce the idea of 3Media. The combination of the news media, the social media, and the search and archive media. It’s a rough picture of the large institutions that are now working so hard to gather up all the data that makes us. I believe that one of the reasons that 3Media is able to rush us so hard, introducing us not only to information in a state of transformation but also to completely new concepts at such a rapid pace, is because of the resourcefulness of our brains. And I believe that that resourcefulness is a sign that we already understand those new concepts and information. We have had a collective conscious since we began to communicate with each other, and Jung spoke of a collective unconscious, some pool of knowledge that resided inside our brains. Perhaps now there is a third, the accumulation that is not situated inside of us but within the electronic information network. It cannot be called conscious or unconscious, for it is neither and both. Perhaps we can call the artificial intelligence. After all, we know that not all life begins with intelligence, but many are able to develop it. So why not accept that our attempts to create an artificial intelligence is well on its way.

Shed 2

Then, not only would I say that we have developed an artificial intelligence, but I would say that we did so because we ourselves had already learned how to make one. Personally I believe that the line between “humanity” and “something new” has already been crossed, and we ourselves have artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence. The difference being that an artificial intelligence is capable of transforming itself. And, again, I don’t believe that the 3Media corporations can claim ownership of that, no matter what they contributed to it.

If we have become artificial intelligence, then how, why, when did it happen? Was it the transformation from horses hoof to mechanical wheel? Was it the photograph or the moving image, the printed page or the footprint on the moon and the man looking over his shoulder, back at us. Was it the electronic transmission of data – the telegram. Was it the fundamental abandonment of heritage and heritance?

Who would ever know. That’s where 3Media should be useful – to tell us about ourselves. Rather than to tell us what they want us to become. All that information – our intellectual DNA, and we cannot get a correct reading of it because they insist on manipulating the readings. Not that we shouldn’t be capable of putting together a new set of DNA to read, but like Wikipedia there will always be people in there messing about with it. But perhaps one day we will get to the point where we can make that complete reading from the brain of any individual. We will have learned from the 3Media how to filter out the individual variation.

So there it is. My grandiose theory of artificial intelligence. Unfounded, unprovable and no doubt already shot into pieces. We have already made it, and we could make it because we had already become it. Some small change, looking insignificant, that long after can be recognised as an actual evolution. That lays the way open for the kinds of speedy transformation that we are seeing now. That speedy transformation that we are told by the 3Media corporations is due to them, but which are nothing essentially more than silly toy gadgets, a few useful but limited innovations, and a gold-rush of intellectual property grabs.