artificial-intelligence

Storing the Stories and Everything Else

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So a few more thoughts may be necessary about technology. Because, even if it’s clearer than ever that the net has its drawbacks, not least it’s mounting contribution to CO2 emissions, it’s probably also clearer than ever that the net isn’t going away any time soon. It’s revolutionised so many facets of life and, at its best, holds huge potential for less energy intensive ways of conducting our lives. Certainly, for anyone involved in information or communications, it’s become all but indispensable. And this means that, for most, it’s a thing we have to work with. It might be better in many respects if people collectively walked away from their screens, but outside neo-primitive bubbles, it’s probably not going to happen.

And while the arguments go on about the huge amounts of power needed to power and cool the growing pile of server farms, and while we can contribute to those efforts, there are things anyone of us can do to moderate our impacts. One is to use a green search engine like Ecosia, whose server farms are powered by clean technology and whose every search raises money for campaigns to protect the Amazon, however counterintuitive that may seem. Another is that open windows, programmes and switched on machines are still burning up juice. We could do worse than to take a leaf out of the New Home Front initiative and try and remember that a more wartime like approach to energy conservation is as necessary now as ever.

We need to rediscover a greater awareness towards, if not an abject horror, of wasting energy. And technology could help with that – if a programme existed that could make us more aware of the amount of power our machines are burning up at any given point then perhaps we’d find it easier to take stock. And perhaps somebody somewhere at some stage might need to start thinking about prioritizing what we’re saving on the servers – every book ever written, the pinnacles of learning and literature, or a billion updates on what people had for breakfast or a sea of endless Youtube videos of people eating raw chillies?

Perhaps most crucially there’s a very important case to look at our overriding relationship with technology. While the internet has its various boons we could maybe remind ourselves that it shouldn’t become an end in itself. Or, to put it another way, we should let the net aid our lives, not become the primary port of call, the dominant preoccupation that overrides everything else great, beautiful and of use in the world. We need to shift the balance in our priorities so that machines remain the servants and their myriad conveniences don’t put them in the driving seat.

What is really needed then is a greater sense of synthesis, of balance. That might mean for instance that we each of us make more time for reading more books, or spending time with friends or family, or spending more time outdoors and pursuing activities that encourage that. Life infront of a screen has become the modern grindstone – we should take what chances present themselves to spend time away from the glowing allure.

Particularly worrying then in many respects is the rise of smart phones. Leaving aside their ecological ramifications, the power of one of these machines held in your hands is phenomenal and, while their many uses are clear to see, the addiction to technology they often carry with them are also equally obvious. Someone I knew was so hooked to looking up new music that she almost missed moving house as she couldn’t find it in herself until the very last minute to drag herself away to prepare. We’ve long passed the point whereby it’s clear that technology can really screw you up.

Is it really such a hardship then, when the work has been done, to switch off the screen and walk out again into the world, remember that the sun and rain on your face holds a kind of richness computers can never emulate? I remember what spurred me to spurn my teenage computer game addiction was the dreams I had after immersion whereby reality had become pixilated and defined by the limitations of the programmers’ imaginations. To say nothing of the huge amount of hours such games ate up. As machines have become more refined the different reality they represent is maybe less stark but arguably no less insidious.

Knee jerk reactions to technology at large help no one. But we could also be on the threshold of an explosion in rediscovering and pushing human potential. Imagine those untold riches of mnemonics that allowed storytellers in pre-literate cultures to hold such huge swathes of information and lore in their memories. Think of what being the depository of such riches must have felt like – the sense of internal integration and inner wealth. Think of the singers who carry their songs, or of the poet Osip Mandelstam whose life was taken by the Stalinist regime but many of whose poems survived by the fact that his wife had committed them to memory.

Memorisation and mnemonics represent a kind of potential armoury unassailable by almost anything except not keeping such memories sharp. That’s maybe a more abiding image of who we can be at our best – alive in the woods round a fire with a database of beauty there to access, not hunched in our rooms scrabbling after a fix of information. That said, there’s never a need to be too hardline. One thing can inform another, inspiration comes from many doors and synthesis can prove a fertile ground for helping us remember how things can be. But if we ever did need to bid the internet farewell, somehow I think we could cope.

Machinations

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Having a dig at technology’s a familiar game. For ninety-nine percent of the population it usually smacks of hypocrisy or reversion to some almost reactionary form, to the point where no one bothers anymore; the things machines can do for us present such an undeniable logic that any dissent’s already tantamount to heresy. And yet there is often a sense that all our shining gadgets – which seem to preoccupy much more of the collective consciousness than the fact that the ice sheets are rapidly melting – all too often come with more than the obvious price tag.

There’s a sense too – if we consider for a moment where we all might be in a decade or two’s time – that current sureties should not be taken for granted, that even if things bumble along much the same, there is a great deal now at stake and the degree to which we can imagine something different, the clarity with which we can diagnose what does not serve the highest good may make all the odds in delivering a better future, or at least steering clear of some of the worst possibilities.

So perhaps it’s not too idealistic to hope for a day when we might be content with less ambitious acquisitions, when we might seek to fall back on older currencies that can sustain us. Such human traits and qualities have still not left us even if at times they seem submerged or even if we sometimes seem terminally distracted by mirages of technology that offer so much but often serve to mask the riches that still lie within us and will never leave, even if we might need some reminding.

Is it productive then to rehearse more formally the drawbacks of our glittering screens – the footprints there for unknown agents to pursue, the inbuilt costs, the unseen toil of other hands in other countries who know nothing of safeguards for the people put to work? Do we need reminding of the huge costs ecologically? Or of the way in which the net and its constant feed of urgent news, it’s habit forming drive to direct us to new links and new windows can affect our concentration and even our consciousness itself? This is apparently proved by a much greater reluctance or capacity for paying attention to books or even long articles with the kind of deep reflection and singularity of intent such activities were once more associated with.

The world has changed, children must be prised from mobile phones before they sleep and can we ask is this the culmination of our hope and aspiration, are we all held in suffrage to machines? And even then some all-out-all-or-nothing seems enflamed when viewing all the gifts computers and the internet appear to offer: the way in which they have connected people, the huge amounts of information made available so easily, even their more democratic effects. But there’s surely at least a case for moderation, for better use, for more discerning application of the gifts that they can give us. Although the sense remains it may be better to hold some other skills in tandem, to not feel so bereft should technology desert us or should electricity become a thing whose steady flow cannot be always taken as a given.

In his book ‘The Eco Technic Future’, John Michael Greer talks of a thing called ‘scarcity industrialism’ whereby the industrial world carries on in a broadly similar fashion to how it does now, only accounting for the relative scarcity of fuel with which to operate. This means operations being carried out while introducing every possible efficiency – a long way away from the profligate use of energy in many industries today. On a personal level this can be mirrored by our habits as consumers: we can seek to get the most life as possible out of every appliance and develop habits of consumption that place a pride in reclamation and repair – lightyears then from many current patterns of built-in obsolescence and mounting piles of mobile phones as the latest editions are placed on the market.

But the extent of how we may be in danger of losing our way and the necessity of finding our way back can be measured by more than looking at our patterns of acquisition of the latest thing. How many of us hold within us still the old ability to sit down and compose a letter without the aid of cursors or ubiquitous functions of spell checks, cut and pasting or the strange seductive comforting effect of glowing screens? How many people still can engage with any mathematics without some form of digital pad? What other skills go squandered in our service to these double edged heaps of circuitry? What gypsy is dependent on a plug, and how then do we calibrate our dreams? Even expansive emails seem old fashioned in the wake of one-click-says-all all pervading social media.

How many of us are a little more unapproachable as we sit cocooned and earphoned up on public transport, opportunities for interaction slipping away unlooked for and unnoticed, the once familiar skill of striking up a conversation now a little more removed, each of us more separate, cut off, imprisoned in our little universe, the so-called walkman generation now like sanitised, too-familiar versions of the figures on architectural drawings where we are all factored in to some remote designer’s new world order; anaesthetised, predictable, obedient consumers in a system that is more than any grand design; as if there was a kind of raw and cold intelligence of the machine itself; always seeking to calibrate a thing that it can never understand: our human minds, our hearts.