Future Shock and Its Rot (by sarah)

We are creating a new Category "Future Shock and Its Rot" to go along with things like Aethelflaed and All Things Anglo Saxon, Moon Mania and Beyond, and Ammonites and All Things Cephalopod. These are categories that define specific topics of research or longer form projects such as poetry collections. Topics written about in these "Quests" will also appear in other categories such as history or technology, but tend to have over arching themes that need looking at all collected together rather than just disappearing into the broader categories.

I (Sarah) have been debating the addition of this category for a couple of years now because I am aware I straddle two worlds - Art and Science/Craft and Technology and though people would like to split them into exact dichotomies they are not, but they do tend to exist socially in distinct and separated communities. I have always seen myself as a bridge between those communities - back in the day helping artists with websites and following the progress of accessibility tools without which I would not have been able to complete my degree, as at one point I had lost the use of my hands for even holding a book to read, and of course my interest in green technologies and medical advancement as well as the intersection of tech and art in things like case modes and poems about Markov chains.

My two worlds are imploding and exploding and warring and hating and hurting in a great big mess involving greed and witch hunts and a perfect example of dipoled thinking that is currently crippling our society in everything at the moment.

The topic I am avoiding writing is of course AI - a meaningless term in and of itself. I have avoided writing about it because as I said I straddle the two worlds and am in the weird position of watching as a tech utopia I had envisioned 20 years ago can now never be, even though the technology for it now exists. And watching those technologies being badly and irresponsibly made and used causing ecological and economic devastation whilst still having to defend the use of technologies that provide access for disabled people like me, which have all been rebranding as AI for marketing purposes, and having to field issues such as getting my work rejected because I have "obviously used AI" when I have not, but work of mine that has been published has been scraped and I write genre anyway..... or my photos of storm light looking too realistic or the astronomy photo montages... a story of false AI use accusations that can currently sink your career.

I was loathed to start writing without doing a lot of research and then even more so when I realised it would be a topic I am on both sides of - something that will endear me to nobody and actively harm my career and then the issue that I am now going to be filling our over 20 year old blog with terms that may break who finds it and associates all our work with AI because algorithms can not get the nuance or even often the bluntness of a written argument often misunderstanding whether something is for or against a thing let alone giving complex overviews.

So I spoke to Alaric and the kids about this to check everyone was ok with me writing and potentially breaking our family blog and then I started my deep dive. And some of the stuff I have mentioned above happened after I started this deep dive and I realised I didn't want to just be writing about the negative either - there are plenty of awesome things happening but at the same time as I tried to research this topic and some stuff for post COVID revival projects. The more obvious it became that the wonderful window to people and knowledge that I had watched grow throughout my life was dying or in its death throes. The internet as I knew it doesn't really exist and that added a new quandary - was there any point in even attempting this? Will people even see it?

My conclusion was that it doesn't really matter if others get to see this as I need to put it down in writing so that I personally know where I am going with it! And there is rot and destruction and active death but there also needed to be scope to still celebrate and mark the good and just discuss the "ugly" or ill fitting parts. Bits that might fall into the good or the bad depending on how they are used or implemented.

I had already written Future Shock almost a decade ago now and that techno-social aspect has lingered in my thoughts and the disparity has grown. It was the moment we realised we were living in the future - I remember Charles Stross mentioning his similar moment which was a laptop-using cybergoth girlfriend and a "I'm living in a cyberpunk novel" realisation.

I am alive due to medical tech and people I know have been using AI to find and fight cancer... brain injury survivors and the elderly struggle to use the online world the doctor's surgery try and force you to use to order prescriptions and make appointments... I have had to talk vulnerable adults out of actions AI chat bots have encouraged...

Once upon a time I was very excited about Google Deep Dream and trained it with photos I'd taken to produce a book baby and other bizarre concoctions and my poetry was on a website under a specific licence because it was being used with permission for a language model to create poetry. These were interesting and fun art projects - the images were delightfully weird and the poetry, so obviously generated, was the entire point. This was machine art with human curators.

So how I can say I am anti AI and I definitely can't say I have never used it - other artists when I explained my projects to told me to rename them - they aren't the same as what is happening and accessibility tools are not the same... but on some level they are, and this is where the tangle exists... pretending you have drawn something created, and where the material used to train the AI come from, is important but is a distinction many in the Arts community do not want to acknowledge or more likely simply do not know about. The poem generator was also next to a poetry ping pong where different types of words are on different coloured ping pong balls and you turn the handle to produce a sentence - they both used the same under laying language constructs... this was a Literature Festival about 20 years ago - these fun things could not happen now.

And what even is AI? What is meant? Artificial Intelligence has meant many things to many different people and those in industry use it differently from those in academia, who have several uses depending on which research groups they work with, and this is all different from sci-fi readers which is different again from the general public and of course the marketing department is something else again. So there is a language barrier, and when I was first looking at writing about all this there actually was not the language to do so - sure I could make up terms but sometimes it is best to wait and see what words emerge. and sometimes due to dual meanings or ambiguous or rarely used acronyms you still end up making up your own terms for things. AI needs a lot of defining at the moment and it is a forever shifting landscape under my keyboard clicking fingers.

To try and work all this out I have been attending tech events and discovering some awesome charities Tech4Good SouthWest and more weapon design companies masquerading as humanitarian aid than I thought possible.

When offered sessions with experts I have taken them... they suggested I write a series of articles, or a book, or a series of workshops to explain the whole AI thing across multiple industries and the first time I was like "but... but that is why I am here... I wanted another answer - case studies I could point people at - lovely summaries" but apparently they do not exist yet and as the months drew on and I was getting the same response in despair I have been thinking this is going to be more than a simple few blog posts, and I don't really want to do it, but I can not see disabled people excluded from creative spaces just because of a confusion of word use and I can not leave the dangers of chat bots left unsaid and I can not ignore the environmental impact or the lost legacies of AI contaminated medical data bases.

And I can't ignore that sometimes AI is a tool for art but that the ethics of using ones trained on stolen art has possibly destroyed any legitimate use of it for that. Curation, intention and directional lead are important with inkblot paintings as much with AI which is why I am horrified to see such bad images being produced.

At an arts strategy group I attended the AI Good or Bad Session and I said "if you are going to steal the art and cost the earth can't you at least make sure there are no extra legs or pugs of a million eyes."

The environmental impact is bad - you can tell it's bad by the fact that companies dumped their green credentials in a way that had the geek communities in uproar. With situations like noise pollution caused by temporary generators in car parks and extreme energy and water consumption and that is before we look at emissions in general and building on what had previously been protected land (or at least attempts including here in the UK).

The concept of Meek Geek has been supplanted with Crypto/tech/AI Bro and all our heroes are dead or have been exposed as the villains. The great philanthropy future is drowning under billionaires, and the coders with consciences are working for community interest companies and not really making much money.

This keeps sounding like it will be all depressing but it won't be, honestly - I want to look at ways forward and positive developments too! I mainly want to untangle it all.

Future Shock (by sarah)

A cold frosty morning with delineated skies of faded ice cream colours, we look out over Gloucester with it's historical buildings as they puncture and frame the ancient landscape around them. The air is misty cool and I feel sick at the sight of a frost covered sleeping bag hidden in a corner, the occupant is alive and I sigh in relief, the air tastes of ozone and fumes and rotting food until it is all over lain by the sugar-fat smell of the doughnut van cooking their first batch of the day.

The progress of time marches on, we seem to have been stuck for a long time, at least ten years we failed to roll with the waves of advancement, we barely noticed them.

Before that we thought we'd march singing and triumphant into a future of virtual reality and medical advancement and the healing of our societies and nature. We are 80's childs though Alaric was born in the 70's - just.

When the mysterious x-box was sent to us for Christmas a couple of years ago and we found we could do physical games with it, we knew the future had arrived and we had somehow missed it.

We think on these things, we park our car... we plug it in.

We have FUTURE SHOCK.

When we drive we can plug in and charge our books, my friend charges her cigs. My mum is in hospital but she is alive, alive because of amazing medical advancements made in the last twenty years, made in my lifetime. My dad is the same, a hundred years ago he would have died in his early 30's, he turns 70 this year. I am alive, one of my children is a c-section babe, we walk paste the homeless on the way to dance classes and I swollow the bile that rises. The future is being good to us but it is rather too threaded through with cyber-punk dystopian chords than I would like. Our eldest complains that people live in apartments with all they could want and swimming pools on balconies that over look slums.... how could they?

I frown how different from that are we?

But we do stuff she insists. Yes we do, we don't know what others do or do not do. The Future is full of mental and moral pit falls I never saw coming, like Brexit... like finding myself on the side of the haves and seeing what it would do to the have nots and despairing as I knew which way they would vote and why and neither side would listen, dipolling themselves further.

The divide is growing. But uneven.

Sometimes it overwhelms me, all the thinks to think about, all the interconnect facets of our time and world and society. The environment, housing conditions, health, respect for others, not becoming an oppressor when you have been repressed but not slipping in the victim mentality, stopping cruelty, allowing freedom. Sometimes I can't process it all and I have to ignore it to function and do anything and that maybe selfish but if I don't then we can't do anything. When overwhelmed we can not organise fundraises or gather supplies for food banks or try and remember to shop ethically when we can afford to do so.

Adaption is key and not being judged for buying primarny when there is no time or money but looking nice is an imperative and the way our society works yes you do need to sometimes look nice... like job interviews etc... I am not saying that is right, but it is a reality.

We are lucky, having had times of not being lucky we are acutely aware of the contrast and how fragile that can be. Yes we've safe guarded ourselves this time - as much as we can - because we can. But we are more determined than ever to make a good future - the future maybe here but that doesn't mean we can't improve it and more importantly it is not here for everybody.

So we change what we can where we can, sometimes the difference is so minute we can not even appreciate it and sometimes it is for many and sometimes it is just a packet of sani pads sent to the food bank or a conversations with someone.

Sometimes it is saving up money to try and pay for surgery privately for a parent and not getting there before the nhs sorts them out and then having a deposit and luck to get a new car on lease, a car that will help the environment and our long term spending as it is cheaper to run. Sometimes it is then giving the other car, the old polluting the air car, to your parents because they no longer have a mobility car because... austerity and the damage it causes especially to older folk who drastically go down hill if they can't get out and about, ending up in hospital costing the tax payers more money than their mobility allowance ever cost.

To miss-quote Terry Pratchett - we can't make everything better but we will make the little bit we can see and touch as bettererererrrrr as we can. Granny Weatherwax says it better in The Shepherd's Crown.

It took us ages to work out how to unplug the damn car so you know the future is never going to be plain sailing.