Looking out at strange cities
Making sense of the coherent complexities of AI-empowered futures
Predicting the future, even in broad brush strokes, is difficult. A visitor from the 19th Century would find today’s world like a strange city — they could watch the bustle around them and tell that it had its own coherent patterns, and many of these would rhyme with patterns they were familiar with (crops being harvested, children going to school, sports played for leisure, politics played for lives), but a lot would also be different (cars!), weird (video games!), or at times incomprehensible (blockchain!).
I think we stand in a similar position with respect to our own future. Moreover, I think that AI is going to automate a lot of things — and as a result changes are going to speed up. By the time my young children are grown up, I think the world may look pretty weird to the people of 2024.
I’m going to use this substack to try to make sense of the shapes of the possible strange cities we might go to — and draw this back to whether that means we should be having a word with the architects1, or otherwise taking some action in the short-term. I’m going to be focused on the middle-futures, where AI is transforming the world but humans still have a lot of meaningful power, rather than thinking about anything like end-states, or times which are so unrecognizable that I can’t meaningfully speak about them.
My reasoning will be a mix of the analytic and the holistic. Through all of this, my drives are to explore, to understand, and to inform. I’ll err towards presenting models which are a little more firm and confident than I really believe, because I think being concrete makes it easier to get value from the models (and also to notice when they’re wrong and build new ones to supersede them). But if you ever think my pictures are missing things, I’d love to hear about them.
i.e. us; although we’re not always conscious of that.