Long Now

How will AI shape our understanding of our creativity and ourselves? In February, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell delivered a fascinating Long Now Talk that explored the dimensions of Neural Media — their term for an emerging set of creative forms that use artificial neural networks inspired by the connective design of the human brain. Their Long Now Talk is a journey through the strange valleys and outcroppings of this age of neural media. That journey began in 02015, in the wake of K Allado-McDowell’s encounter with an image known as “trippysquirrel.jpg.” That picture — a squirrel flowing into dog into a slug, a hallucinogenic collection of misplaced eyes and waves of color — was generated by what was then a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system: a convolutional neural network. What AI researchers did with the creation of images like “trippysquirrel.jpeg” was to invert the traditional role of the neural network as classifier: transforming it into a tool for the generation of novel material. The captivating, uncanny potential of these AI-generated images inspired Allado-McDowell to form and lead the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google, and to begin their own explorations into co-creating art with artificial intelligence. Now, after a decade spent composing novels, operas, and more alongside a variety of AI models, Allado-McDowell sees the mode of creativity offered by these non-human intelligences as not just a novelty but an entirely new, sometimes bizarre paradigm of media. Allado-McDowell tells a fascinating story involving statistical distributions, anti-aging influencers at war with death itself, and vast quantities of “AI Slop,” the low-quality, faintly surreal output of cheap, rapidly proliferating image models. Yet even in this morass of slop Allado-McDowell sees reason for optimism. Referring to the title of their 02020 book Pharmako-AI, which was co-written with GPT-3, Allado-McDowell notes that the Greek word pharmakon could mean both drug and cure. What may seem poisonous or dangerous in this new paradigm of neural media could also unlock for us new and deeper ways of understanding ourselves, our planet, and all of the intelligent networks that live within it.

We find ourselves in a pre-paradigmatic moment in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it. The task of philosophy today is to catch up. In his Long Now Talk, Philosopher of Technology Benjamin Bratton took us on a whirlwind philosophical journey into the concept of Planetary Computation — a journey that began in classical Greece with the story of the Antikythera mechanism, the analog computer that gave his think-tank Antikythera its name. But his inquiry stretched far beyond antiquity — back to the very origins of biological life itself and forward to a present and future where we must increasingly grapple with artificial life and intelligence on a planetary scale in time and space. How might complex planetary intelligence thrive over the long now? To Bratton, that intelligence is a “emergent phenomenon of an ancient and deep biogeochemical flux” — not merely resident to the Earth but an outcropping from it. Our planet has evolved us, and we have in turn evolved a stack of technologies that can help us understand and govern that very same planet that produced us. The preconditions for long-term adaptiveness, Bratton argues, will need to be artificially realized, and we won’t be able to control what happens as a result of bringing them into existence. This, Bratton says, is the Copernican trauma of our time. In concluding his remarks, Bratton turns to James Lovelock, the pioneering environmental scientist who first proposed the Gaia Hypothesis. Referencing Lovelock’s final book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (02019), Bratton notes that for both Lovelock and himself the potential coming of post-human intelligence was not cause for “grief.” Instead, the frame of the planetary makes it so that finding ourselves in a grander story where “the evolution of intelligence does not peak with one terraforming species of nomadic primates,” is, to Bratton, “the happiest news possible.”

Neal Stephenson, visionary speculative fiction author and long-time friend of Long Now, joined us for a conversation with journalist Charles C. Mann on the research behind his new novel _Polostan_ , the dawn of the Atomic Age, and the craft of historical storytelling. _Polostan_ is the first installment in a monumental new series called Bomb Light - an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age. Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic from Stephenson, whose prior books include [_Cryptonomicon_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon) and [_The Baroque Cycle_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle)

Alternative visions for social change rooted in the frameworks of capitalism and colonialism only reproduce contemporary structures of power. How can indigenous perspectives and knowledge inform the structural transformation necessary to improve the health of the natural world and of human communities? Dr. Cordero discussed how indigenous epistemologies challenge the ideas and practices related to capitalism and colonialism and how the enhancement of indigeneity and sovereignty are critical to the maintenance of indigenous epistemologies. Throughout his talk, Dr. Cordero drew from academic and communal discourses on decolonization, settler colonialism, and epistemicide, revealing the nuances of indigenous worldviews with deeply researched case studies. Dr. Cordero also shared how indigenous perspectives and knowledge inspire work of the [Association of Ramaytush Ohlone](https://www.ramaytush.org/), where he serves as Executive Director.

_What really interests me is how long-lived plants allow humans to think about—and emotionally relate to—long units of time. They provide a bridge between human time and geological time. - Jared Farmer_ In his Long Now Talk, Geohumanist and historian Jared Farmer shared his multi-faceted approach to understanding our human relationship with trees over millennia. From ancient stories, as objects of reverence, named individuals and clonal organisms, sources of wealth in ancient and modern times, the lungs of the planet and the wood wide web - trees are deeply interwoven with our histories, cultures and growing scientific understanding of our complex global ecosystem. Through his work, Farmer reflects on our long-term relationships with long-lived trees, and considers the future of oldness on a rapidly changing planet.

Over the last two years, the US government has started thinking about the future of the world in a very different way. Across speeches and policy papers, a vision of world politics has emerged which breaks sharply both with the old logic of the Cold War and the newer politics of globalization. The globalization bet has turned sour, but it has created a far more closely connected world than ever existed before. Problems such as climate change, economic inequality, food security, supply chain vulnerabilities, democratic weakness and mass migration emerge from the interdependent choices of people and governments in a global system without any global rulers. In a complex interdependent world, is the only way forward to accept these complexities, and try to work with them? That is the challenge that the US now faces – moving from the simple imagined futures of the past to a more entangled and realistic vision of our planet's future. This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us?ref=longnow.org) (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.