Stay Human
Para ler em português, clique aqui.
____________________ p r o l o g u e _______________________
This newsletter is illustrated by Ingrid Kita*
December, with its Sagittarius vibe, exposes it all by unveiling the arrow of time. An organic yet mismatched sensation of looking back while aiming for the future. And as we imagine the next decade, the dystopian nature of everyday events, with infinite projections of doom, jeopardizes our ability to dream (remember our October edition?). Me, on the other hand, leonine being, feel confident about the invisible network that forms our collective intelligence, the one that made us cooperate (not compete) and survive up to now. That’s why, in a megalomaniac and endearing exercise, I like to think that at the beginning of the upcoming decade we’ll all get on the same boat towards humanity.
On the cooperation movement, I share Douglas Rushkoff’s angle, north-American, teacher and theorist of the new, yet urgent, field of what we call “digital humanities”. In January 2019, Douglas released Team Human, a manifest that uses metaphors about teamwork to mobilize humanity in the face of technocratic society threats and more precisely the flaws and ambitions that we place in the development of massively adopted technologies.
As a result of our upbringing, we face the unawareness of our collective consciousness because we were told to focus on individual competitiveness. Sometimes, it’s easier to have intimacy with social media rather than connect by looking someone in the eye. With very little discernment to distinguish public from private joy, we yield our intimate moments and trade them for social currency. We are communicating, but most times only by competing for a place under the sun instead of cooperating and sharing.
Still thinking about our evolution abilities, it’s crystal clear that in order to recover some of our state of consciousness as well as collective wisdom, we need to cooperate with each other. Only with global mobilization and free from the fear of the complexities of living in society, we will be able to recreate the paths of human civilization — and mainly, of our home, better known as planet Earth.
The need of staying human is urgent. And in this path, we need to dedicate ourselves to nurturing our best as a species, so that our cooperation can redesign more complex social structures, yet more concerned about human permanence. And if such goal appears to be so distant, focusing on the present seems to be a priority. In the face of the global suicide epidemic, affecting not only youth in Brazil but worldwide, we need to create better existential possibilities for everyone. We need to meet, talk, dream, and do it quickly. Our focus cannot be on measuring the numbers and statistics of technological advancements — instead, we need to react upon the very real threats in the quality of human relations. We are more lonely, more anxious, polarized, with very little patience, looking at screens instead of looking at each other.
The biggest threat of our time would be to overlook this danger and perpetuate the anti-human project currently established. Our ability to thrive and change this dystopian scenario is purely social and relies on our capacity of acting together as a group. As people with large privileges in access to information and digital literacy, we have more responsibility in using technology to change things. By nurturing our social and professional relations, sharing the love for the people we care about and our connection with the things we love, admiration, intimacy, happiness, and unhappiness, we are feeding the world’s data network with our most important asset: human capital.
With our easy access to modern-day technology, we cannot be naive and ignore the true role of social media in creating platforms for data processing. As digital creators, we need to develop an awareness of how we use the internet as well as understand we are feeding algorithms that can jeopardize our autonomy and ability to choose freely. In an era where big money goes to data commerce, we are, on a daily basis, telling governments and companies how to better convince us and communicate with us (better-known as memes). Memes are viral data that attack our social immunity, a way of communicating that triggers an automatic response, a mix of gossip and fast food very tempting for our most primitive impulses.
The technology challenges we face in Brazil are the same worldwide. But when it comes to Latin America, the most unequal region of the world, and especially Brazil, the social and economic abyss is brutal: while our machines are learning fast, we have one of the worst educational systems in history, and this impact can be seen on our PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) numbers. We have a lot to learn. When we focus on a project that celebrates humanity, the goal is human knowledge, not technological knowledge. Our challenge here is human survival. It is the perpetuation of our social, chemical and emotional abilities.
And, finally, if there’s still some space left on my wishlist, next year, I would like us all to go out for some coffee more often, to take fewer pictures, less Whatsapp groups; to migrate from WhatsApp to Telegram, to stay away from standardization when meeting our needs, to start thinking and executing more long-term, less tendonitis and other symptoms from abusing our phones, to go back to using alarm clocks, to go out there to protest more frequently, and to talk an entire hour without any screen interruption.
concepts >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
01 Robot — Karel Capek piece, in 1921, a.k.a R.U.R (Rossum Universal Robot), marks the first use of the word “robot” to describe something of artificial nature. For that term, the author was inspired by a Czech word that meant forced labor. The word “robot” entered English dictionaries in 1923, two years later.
02 Autopoesis — A concept referring to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. It seems the concept proposed by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1973 is a fine metaphor to define this moment when living beings need to perpetuate the conditions for their own survival.
— — — — h o r i z o n — — — — — — — — — — — — — — →
Everything Manifesto — A thought experiment for the next billion seconds. The following manifesto is an introduction to ‘The Weirdness of Interdependencies’, the research theme for the upcoming edition of IAM Weekend (March 19–21, 2020. Barcelona) that will focus on how organization and citizens can address the weird implications of the design, mythologies, and usages of the internet(s) and digital technologies in the environmental emergency. Dealing With Bias in AI — Very good article about algorithms bias, Daphne Koller, Coursera founder, emphasizes the tied connection between algorithms and the context in which they are applied. She explains that the real problem is when we use an algorithm in a context that differs from its creation, that is, with a sample that was not part of the data composition, to begin with.
It struck me to bring the bias rigor to the notion of applying and using artificial intelligence, and not only to a “more technical” point of view of mathematical creation that involves the development of any algorithm.
Ingrid Kita graduated in design from PUC-Rio. She develops sculptures and other pieces in her investigation of the body — a soft and inflated object that allows us to access what cannot be seen. She uses industrial design as a tool to materialize, create and exist.
That’s all for 2019,
Thanks for your patience and to help me with this project, see you in 2020!
