Some follow-up thoughts from the discussion at the second AI Literacy salon that took place at Index Chinatown on May 13th1.
What is actually evolving, and what is only being assembled?
When we put minds and machines on the same track, pointed at the same horizon, is that a real comparison? Is what you call growth the same thing a model is doing when a better one ships and replaces it? Is anything in that room growing, or is most of it just being built?
Everything starts and ends in language. Most days, it feels limiting. The shape other people press you into, the experience, an old clarity that blocks what’s next. But with vertical development, we can start to identify doors where the walls are, waiting to be opened. Tired language opens up for deconstruction, and meaning is waiting to be found and shared. Language is where value lives. Economics and communication are the same act. Your consciousness is not action-dependent. You are not the sum of last week’s shipment; your value is your utility plus your aesthetics: your way of seeing the world, your way of being you, and intuiting decisions (design and decision making are the same).
A culture of productivity sells the opposite. A reductive person and a reductive algorithm (all algorithms are reductive) speak the same statistical language.
Answering what you know but can’t explain is how you get closer to your aesthetics2.
Machines do not evolve. They get built, and when the next one arrives, the last one goes in a drawer. Saying a machine evolves is like saying your iPhone grew from your telephone. That the rotary handset on your grandmother’s kitchen wall slowly stretched, brightened, and learned to be a camera. It did not. Someone designed each step. Someone threw the previous one out. That is not evolution. It is a replacement for a flattering verb.
Evolution is the slow transformation of something that remains itself through change. There is something that is you that remains as you change and become. The phone does not. A model does not. You do.3
Use language as a lockpick, because it is how you find yourself underneath the consensus. Trust the part of you that was creating before it could name what it was doing. That part is not borrowed. Stop letting output (job titles are output, too) decide who you are. The source is upstream and quieter. And take the word evolution back from the things that are only being rebuilt.
You and the machines were never in the same race. You were never in a race at all. The only thing in that room with a past, a future, and the same interior connecting them was you. The machines will be replaced. You are the one who actually grows.
To stretch the line between machines and nature, consider if this project from Jonathon Keats (Ep 9) is generative art.
AI Literacy is the ability to know when to go from the general to the specific, to learn the way we think, so as to be able to discern when others around us (machines or people) are doing the same.
What’s next?
AI Literacy School starts in June and is 20% off before Memorial Day. We start with a masterclass on when computational thinking slows you down.
https://luma.com/ai-literacy
Oh, and we have a physical library in Greenpoint, which you can see here https://library.criticalbusinessschool.com
The whole course is also 20% before Monday. Reply to this email if you want the link.
For the slides and conversation, join us at cbs.dfos.com
You can find more prompts on creative-surplus.com.
More on what is invented, discovered, or grows in this book by Brian Arthur.