Trying to map a new nexus of ideas that’s getting woven in to my thinking. Is it mission creep? or a promising direction for unpicking what I want to solve? For now, this is just a stream of consciousness of the ideas at play. It might be useful to try to mesh it with my earlier attempt at a Problem Statement.
- This implies that “knowledge work”/creative work as I’ve thought of it elsewhere are threaten with displacement by a cultural technology. By analogy to the displacement of manufacturing by technology in the (last?) Industrial Revolution, is it appropriate to call knowledge work “cultural production”?
Unaccountability as a fundamental malaise, or a failing of our prevailing cultural technologies. This stands to be exacerbated, perhaps critically, by the addition of AI.
- I think I will need to start distinguishing AI, in the sense of the neutral computational technologies it colloquially refers to, from AI-as-implemented in our economy.
- interesting that accountability for a creation is something I have written about as so important to good product management (and by inference a wider sphere of creative coordination and leadership) already.
- again, will need to be much more precise about what accountability means, here and elsewhere. Should consider FD Signifier’s comments on the term (in the context of parasocial attempts to “hold people accountable”).
- I wonder if we can define it “cybernetically” as something like “the localisation of System X responsibilities (for a subdomain of System 1 operations) with a specific person, where clearly I haven’t adequately internalised the cybernetic sub-Systems just yet.
- should accountability be separated from blame? In some understandings the term could run dangerously close to ideas of punitive justice.
- again, will need to be much more precise about what accountability means, here and elsewhere. Should consider FD Signifier’s comments on the term (in the context of parasocial attempts to “hold people accountable”).
Systemic incentives for homogeneity, imprecision, banality, “SoftWankery”
Hypothesis that there is no tenable vision for the future where indefinite growth of our currently conception of the “good life” can be compatible with environmental boundaries.
- If true, what alternative model can succeed popularly? Degrowth? Radical abundance? Alternative hedonism? Other?
A resulting hypothesis: my instinct is that one can greatly identify the above reasons for our wider societal malaise with the paradigm pushed by Big Tech.
- If so, what can we deduce about how to realise the necessary alternative model within the sphere of personal technology?