human/machine agi

why human goalposts need moving too

Watch the brief video that follows. It sets out why we need to reconsider how we define, deliver, and even measure our idea of technological progress.

It was made a couple of years ago for submission to the PUBLIC-sponsored GovTech event, with an eye to getting an opportunity to pitch to the assembled delegations.

It didn’t achieve its goal, but it compresses a lot of ideas I have had over the years into just two minutes.

I’d vary some of the tone if I did it again, but not the substance or the underlying thesis.

  • Essentially, the video argues, even before Putin’s ongoing aggressions on Ukraine and Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli and Palestinian peoples both, that technologists and technology companies have always defined progress in terms of what their machines and tools can newly do to replace what humans already do. That is, in the eyes of such thinkers, the maximum manifestation of machine progress is to make humans unnecessary: to automate what can be automated forthwith.

  • However, there is another viewpoint we can take, which exists even today in other areas outwith traditional IT and other primarily surveillance-based tech architectures, which is that machines can industrialise us back into an increasingly collective future-present workplace utility.

  • Take the example of the film industry, where microphones, cameras, film language, stages, and a wider mise-en-scene all served over the past century to make humans far more capable and far more important to the industrial processes, which were clearly technological from the start.

If you’re interested in deepening an understanding of where I’m coming from — it’s not always easy because nonconformist thought by its nature often has a lot to unpick to get to its core — I’ve published the below lecture which covers off my most recent thoughts in the light of more recent events.

You can download the original slide-deck by clicking on the button that follows.

Meanwhile, the original whitepaper can be found at our sister site, Secrecy Plus: