May we bring an end to lone humans forecasting our futures

The first time I was fully conscious of it, a lone human forecasting our future, was at a Long Now talk in San Francisco. It happened during a particular moment in the post-lecture Q&A when Stewart Brand asked Kevin Kelly what it might feel like to exist in a cyborg-replica of his current body. A handful of giggles bubbled up in the audience, and then we sat in silence, watching as Kelly pondered his possible somatic relationship to his understanding of an idea in an unlikely possible future.

I tracked Kelly’s eyes tracing the victorian reliefs carved into the wood of the Mezzanine. I could feel the skin around my torso flush with heat. Millions of humans currently do not access a fullness of existence in their bodies due to legislation, malady, and the shackles of systems of oppression, yet here we were waiting for this lone human to describe his relationship to a possible second life.

What are we doing here? Have we forgotten the feeling we had that night at the dinner party when everyone was speaking and listening and laughing and yearning towards truth together? When we felt the. that we were connected to expanded beyond the boundaries of our individual I’s?

What answer could Kelly deliver that would have any baring on the possibility we tasted then? The understanding that doesn’t live in a single data point, nor in the expected value of some elusive regression towards a mean, but in the cellular structure of our connected understanding.

Why have we brought this form of discourse with us into the 21st century? This intellectual posturing of podium and pen? This parading of tidy stories as if Wikipedia or complex non-linear systems don’t exist?

And then it happened again. This time I was sitting at my desk watching a Youtube video of Yuval Noah Harari speaking at the 2018 World Economic Forum. I listened as he spelled out what he feels to be the relevant facts, anecdotes, metaphors, and possibilities for framing an understanding of our collective future. And that’s when it hit me. This is going to continue to happen again and again as long as we allow it to happen. We are going to put people on stage and have them speak for us, and yet they will not be able speak for us, because a single, non-networked instance of consciousness can not speak for the future of a shared existence.

As a person who spends her days generating simulations of possible futures to provide multidimensional landscapes to learning algorithms, I have becoming acutely aware of the fallacy in thinking we can find a unique optimal path through dense forests. This is not to say I don’t respect and value Harari’s individual labor, or Kelly’s, but rather to call into question the manner in which we are developing our intelligence as a species and inviting each other to participate in our individual programs of inquiry. We can’t just keep TED talking at each other.

Does Harari speak for you, or your family, or the stories that emerge in your dreams, or the watershed that sustains you? Did he mention water? Or bacteria colonies forging civilizations in your gut?

Life is created together. In real time. A cacophony of creatures pressed upon by networks of need and desire fulfilled or frustrated by our endless participation with matter and process. We are network. We are squishy, extruded, bio, eco, burst of algae bloom and skyscraper.

What will emerge when we challenge the linear trajectories generated by our solitary idea factories?