So the first review is in for Digital Vs. Human: How we’ll live, love and think in the future. It gets 9/10 and “Watson comes out fighting” from the Herald newspaper, which I’m more than happy to live with in the future.
I’ve just been going through a pile of paper torn out of various magazines over the past year. In the pile I found a single page torn from the New York Review of Books. I’m afraid I’m not 100 % certain who wrote this, but it’s likely to be from the Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen.
“Computers keep total records, but not of effort, and the pages inked out by their printers leave none. Screens preserve no blemishes or failures. Screens preserve nothing human. Save in the fossiliferous prints left behind by touch. But a page – only a page can register the sorrows of the crossings, bad word choice, good word choice gone bad, the gradual dulling of pencil lead…A notebook is the only place you can write about shit like this and not give a shit, like this. Cheap and tattered, a forgiving space, dizzyingly spiral bound, coiled helical. ”
If anyone is wondering how a book gets put together here’s how I did it. Firstly, I didn’t start with a title. In fact for the first 6-months this book was simply called ‘FF2’ (Future Files 2) and later More or Less Human. Eventually a number of key themes started to emerge, notably screens, the internet, phones, automation, robots and AI and eventually the final title (Digital v Human).
As you can see I had an A4 yellow notebook that held all my ideas (not backed up!!!) and eventually I had the key thoughts for each of the chapters once the chapter list was sorted out. The chapter names took forever, but I think they work really well.
So that’s it really. It started in September 2014 and was done by January 2016.
Free chapter downloads and online ordering links here.
Digital Vs. Human launches today in the UK. Free downloads and more here.
Meanwhile, here’s a little something I wrote on the future of bookshops for the Bookseller called Do bookshops have a shelf life?
Very good 9-minute film from PBS. Made in 2013. Link here.
Last year Facebook launched a virtual assistant. It was called Moneypenny after the secretary in the James Bond books. Yet again, a vision of the future was shaped by the past, possibly with a nod to Walt Disney’s Tomorrow Land in the 1950s. Is this sexist or just a natural outcome of the fact that more than two thirds of Facebook’s employees are men? Whatever the reason, the future is generally shaped by white, middle-aged, male Americans. The majority of the World Future Society’s members are white men aged 55 to 65 years of age and when it comes to the media’s go-to guys for discussing the future they’re men too. What this means is that visions of the future are overwhelmingly created by – and to some extent shaped for – a tiny slice of society, one that’s usually in some way employed in science or technology and has not had to struggle too much.
This is perhaps why technological advances usually define the future and why portrayals of the future are almost always optimistic scenarios in which technology will solve all of mankind’s problems. In the future, for example, we’ll all live far longer, which is fine if you have enough money, but less fine if you are already struggling to survive in the present.
Is this a problem? You bet it is. For one thing a lack of diversity in terms of the people imaging the future means that we are missing out on vast networks and frameworks of perspectives, experience and imagination. Second, by focussing on technology we are missing out on the social and emotional side, not to mention the politics of futurism. Scientists and technologists are essential to explore what’s possible in the future, but as Alvin and Heidi Toffler pointed out in their book Future Shock in the 1970s, we also need people from the arts and humanities to explore what’s preferable. We need ethical code alongside computer code. At the moment a tiny minority of people has hijacked the future – less than 0.1 per cent of the world’s population perhaps. What the remaining 99.9 per cent urgently need to do is reclaim it and especially add a softer and more human perspective to the discussion.
Might suit a map on the future of gardening!
I was going to add this as book of the month in brainmail, but I figured it was a little depressing. Here is fine, of course! One for the scenario thinkers at the Ministry of Defence and MI5 perhaps?
A State of Fear: Britain after a Dirty Bomb by Joseph Clyde.
Joseph Clyde is a pseudonym of George Walden btw, a former diplomat and government minister. The book is a novel
Amazon link here.
Apologies, holidays and a book launch, not to mention brainmail issue number 99 to be dealing with. Here’s a little gem I found in the newspapers last weekend.
“Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, dancing; all the things we like doing are about surrender. Religion is the formalised social version of that.” Brian Eno.
Don’t know how I managed to miss the thoughts of Gandhi on man versus machine, but I did…
“The supreme consideration is man. The machine should not tend to make atrophied the limbs of man.”
“What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving money. Men go on ‘saving labour’ till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all.”
“I can have no consideration for machinery which is meant either to enrich the few at the expense of the many, of without cause to displace the useful labour of many.”
“My opposition to machinery is much misunderstood. I am not opposed to machinery as such. I am opposed to machinery which displaces labour and leaves it idle.”
“I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labour, but greed. It is against this constitution of things that I am fighting with all my might….”
“Ours has been described as the machine age because the machine dominates our economy. ‘Now, what is machine?’ one may ask. In a sense, man is the most wonderful machine in creation. It can neither be duplicated nor copied. I have, however, used the word not in its wider sense, but in the sense of an appliance that tends to displace human or animal labour instead of supplementing it or merely increasing its efficiency. This is the first differential characteristic of the machine. The second characteristic is that there is no limit to its growth or evolution. This cannot be said of human labour. There is a limit beyond which its capacity or mechanical efficiency cannot go. Out of this circumstance arises the characteristic of the machine.”