Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We are very fortunate to have Derek Woodgate and
Patrick Lichty to discuss where we are presently, and what's coming
in regards to Virtual Reality, Mediated Reality and Augmented
Reality.

Derek Woodgate (http://futures-lab.com/home) is a consulting
futurist, author, university lecturer and
curator. He has been President of The Futures Lab, Inc. for 21
years. Within the futures field he is known as both the ‘tech
futurist’ and the ‘creative futurist’. Derek's principal expertise
is in the corporate and institutional futures. His past roles on the
board of two major corporations and 17 years SVP level strategic
experience provided the corporate background. Prior to that he was a
diplomat with the British FCO. 

Patrick Lichty (voyd.com) is a media “reality” artist, curator, and
theorist
of over two decades who explores how media and mediation affect our
perception of reality.

Ted Newcomb has been gadding about the WELL since 1995 and happily
co-hosting Inkwell for several years. He is a happily retired
grandfather and actively doing nothing.
  

    
Thank you both for sharing your time and expertise with us. You come
from unique perspectives and active involvements in this Fourth Wave
(stealing from both Alvin Toffler and Robert Scoble).

I guess the basic questions floating around these days are:
Can tech be trusted? Have we made a mistake committing to a digital
future? How do we integrate all this into a happy, healthy life for
ourselves, our families, communities, world?

Does that life exclude privacy, security and freedom as we have
known them? 

What's your takes on where we are and where we are going...the short
run and the long run? Derek, what are the possible futures and
practical
presents? Patrick, if the medium is the message, what's the message
of Digital?
  

    
Feel free to answer those questions in their appropriate landings in
our conversation.

Derek, in 2004 you and Wayne Pethrick wrote Future Frequencies
(https://www.amazon.com/Future-Frequencies-Derek-Woodgate/dp/0970710402) and 
we had the pleasure of interviewing you both here on Inkwell.vue
(topic#238). 
That was only 12 and a half years ago, which in space time does not
seem like 
much, but in tech time is huge. So much has happened since then -
the advent 
of Social Media, the Stacks, video conferencing as an everyday
occurrence. How 
have all these new digital tools and platforms augmented your work
in Future 
Frequencies?
  

    
It is 13 years since Future Frequencies hit the book stands with its
rather progressive approach to what we then all termed futures
studies and is now more commonly referred to as foresight.
Apparently, it was paradigm shifting for the futurists' community at
the time and has led to the birth of both new modeling techniques,
increased rhizomatic thinking approaches and the integration of
digital tools and applications hitherto very difficult to muster.
Now in our 21 year, The Futures Lab has had to both adapt to the new
complexities surrounding a somewhat different client base, who
themselves have become significantly more adaptive, knowledgable
about future potential and expecting a more tech heavy delivery of
futures outcomes and recommendations as well as being able to dip in
and out of the process using collaborative tools and virtual working
environment. A glance at our employee skills today tells us how much
I myself have had to transform my activities and thinking
techniques, while others join and are integrated based upon a whole
new set of tech and other 21st C skills that include: Sense making,
computational and rhizomatic thinking, emotional design, cognitive
interaction, transmedia literacy, trans-culture,
transdisciplinarity, social-motivated creativity, etc.
Foresight is In my opinion, requires both computational linear
reasoning and transformative thinking approaches, even intuition and
a heavy dose of creativity.  As Heinlein says One man's engineering
is another man's magic.

To this end, we have seen the ability to use predictive analysis;
and the ability to cluster big data sets of potential influences
through advanced diagnostics and analysis. Systems thinking is now a
basic tool that is far easier to manage with computational design
than even the systems modeling we were doing long-hand 10 years ago.
There is also the ability for advanced environmental scanning and
pattern recognition that I discussed in detail in Future
Frequencies, when we were already building 3D worlds and
amorphoscapes that helped plot potential future horizons. Now we
really can follow my phrase "Think like a DJ", because it is far
easier to build potential future opportunities frameworks from a
variety of disconnects and then deconstruct their elements and
reconstruct with new perspectives and with contrary contextual
values like upside down world thinking. Another mapping technique is
to take DJ Spooky's thinking of understanding the spaces in between
the rhythms by focusing on the potential scenarios that could arise
from those spaces. We have so many more options with computational
applications to foresight, not to mention emerging visualization
techniques and the way we deliver future scenarios and platforms.
These are unrecognizable from the old style "Day i  a Life" or
traditional narrative based scenarios. Gaming and video have
reconceptualized narrative. VR and AR overlays allow us to create
the future encounter in real virtuality - more or less full
immersion, so that we can experience the scenario and iots potential
impact, whether it is product-based or concept-based. Foresight is
now about foreXperience. Our subsidiary, The FutureXperience Lab
enables us to demonstrate those potential futures in quasi reality.
The other advantage is that TFL's network is so much more
technologically enhanced than in the past, whether it is the ability
to collaborate with the universities or with the labs at the clients
themselves. Given that I teach at both Georgia State University and
the University of Adger in Norway, I am lucky enough to test certain
future concepts both in our interaction and learning labs or through
my students. 
Social media platforms have changed the way we do concept research
and while we still undertake our f2f Frontline Panels of mixed
experts, we are are able to supplement these by setting up highly
effective on-line multi-country participant workshops.
So clients expect more from us in terms of technology infused
foresight, but we are looking all the time to make our already
complex programs more robust, with demonstrations of multiple
potential outcomes. 
  

    
Jaron Lanier has a new book out, Dawn of the New Everything
(https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-New-Everything-Encounters-Reality/dp/1627794093). 
Always worth reading anything by the godfather of VR.

He had a blurb in Wired this month, Reenter the Matrix, so I can't
resist a quote or two:

"Do you see VR and AR as separate? (his response) "I think the
relationship between them is similar to the relationship between
film and television: They come through the same streams to the same
devices, yet they're still distinct. They have distinct cultures,
they're made in different ways, we have different expectations of
them."

"What's a definition of virtual reality that you hope we ultimately
end up with?" "A cross between music and perception"
  

    
Hi, and thanks to Ted for having me. The view here in the Emirates
is truly a futurist one, with our adopting the Blockchain for our
governmental document flow, out first-ever Minister of Artificial
Intelligence, and our design district being a futuristic setting for
Imagine Dragons’ “Thunder” video. I live in applied VR every day, so
I appreciate being in this conversation.
 
To start things off, I was given two questions, and the others have
already jumped in. Being that is it the National Day/Martyr’s Day
long weekend, I’m able to sit down for a more in depth conversation.
 
“As a creative and artist how do see the present digital tool kit
augmenting your 'world' and work?”
As a practitioner of digital art of almost 30 years now, I have a
long view of this. What I think is most exciting about the current
set of tools is the breadth of possibilities; hardware, software,
immersion, fabrication, UX… I take this as an explication of the
massive production of ideas from the Long Tail feeding back into the
enabled technoculture. 
 
For example, as the animator of the activist group The Yes Men over
its first ten years, I think that we were a harbinger of the current
day – the use of media authoring to profoundly shape reality.  For
example, we have always tried to show a world we would “like to
see”; one of peace, humanity, and progressive general welfare. 
However, art technology used in the service of politics can be used
for anyone. When James O’Keefe performed his intervention on NPR, it
was clear that media technological tactics were coopted by the
right.
 
Although I have a definite perspective, I don’t want to center
there, but to merely respond to Ted in saying that things have
gotten squishy.  This has been pretty obvious for a while, but with
the fantastic tools in play today, simulated realities are
increasingly easy, and as long as the notion of “reality bubbles” in
social media and elsewhere increases to intensify, we have the
danger of having localized subjective realities that are
indistinguishable from objective reality.
 
Example: I had a student here in the UAE – highly educated woman; we
spoke for a couple hours about Sartre, Dadaism, Kitaro Nishida’s
notions of Zen Existentialism and Nothingness, and then she
offhandedly asked about the US propaganda regarding the reality of
the Apollo Program, because Kubrick filmed all that, right?  This is
no offense to her, but what has come about in the aestheticized era
of reality is that, given reality tools, which is my medium, reality
itself becomes aestheticized.  While this, the s   quishiness of the
objective with the digital subjective, is where I live, when you
have eventual life and death models like climate change, population
explosions, etc., we have to be intentional with reality tools as
not to abstract objective reality further as to not represent a
singularly Western model.
 
We are almost on an annual revolution cycle now. I got a chance to
meet Israel at the Augmented World Expo conference this year, and I
agree that we are on the way to a next evolution in production, and
I would mention, creativity. And I would like to balance The Fourth
Revolution as a useful Convergence/Singularity-like point of
discussion, the past two examples being other “revolutionary” models
used for capturing the public’s attention, re Kelly’s ‘The Next Big
Thing”. This is how we are in technoculture.
 
We are magicians. Building from Clarke’s Third Law, in that
Technology, sufficiently advanced, becomes Indistinguishable from
Magic, and that makes us Magicians.  However, in the Long View,
there have been a string of Revolutions; for example, my students
asked me in 2010 why I had not told them about developing for the
iPad… It had not existed when they enrolled.  My colleague and I
are, in fact, writing essays on on-the-fly and ad hoc pedagogy in
light of rapid technological change.
 
To ground what might seem like a rambling conversation, artists are
forward observers (as McLuhan saw so aptly), and they are ones who
can, can show the issues of technoculture most clearly, and I think
that this is the most exciting part of being an artist in this time,
as I have building a cybernetic labor farm for the creation of my
drawings as an example.
 
And, secondly, what does the future look like for you, with regards
to VR/MR/AR?
 
I’m, as I usually am, extremely excited and ambivalent, which I feel
is healthy. Hearing Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Makhtoum, Ruler of
Dubai mention that VR/AR are central to the future of Dubai and the
World Expo, as well as spending time at the Dubai Future Foundation
and going to house parties with the Hyperloop Engineering Team says
to me that the future is a given here in the UAE.  The Louvre is a
Gibsonian take on the original institution, and shows again that
reality is terribly squishy.
 
Between myself as an artist and as a futurist, I respect Scoble and
Israel’s vision for what I call the “Next Singularity” (Fourth
Revolution), and I think it is an exciting place for creatives.  For
example the new Adobe Sensei tools will accelerate stylistic
consistency for designers using natural learning algorithms.  As I
see AI and the Blockchain fitting into the “Reality Ecologies”,
commerce, aesthetics, and creative production will expand
exponentially.  However, I wonder about the outcomes as VR is
eventually niched by AR, which will utterly outpace VR in the coming
years.

What are the key artworks of the coming years? My picks lately are
Alex Reben’s “Deeply Artificial Trees”, and Keiichi Matsuda’s
“Hyperreality”. Both show a break from reality that seems absurd,
but as Ted said earlier, what seems incredible today is commonplace
tomorrow.

It is an amazing and humbling thing to be a creative at the apex of
human civilization.
  

    
Sadly, I missed you in UAE. I spent last week in Abu Dhabi meeting
with the Deputy Prime Minister/Minister for the Interior and the
chiefs of police from Dubai and Abu Dhabi discussing the future of
policing. Now I am at a conference in Budapest presenting on the
future of AI and of course in both cases we discussed predictive
security, third eye surveillance with drones and IOT/living
architecture in urban environments, coupled with the use of CCTV as
art and data sculptures that provide both physical and cognitive
feedback. Of course, we spoke of the role of sensor swarms and
networks that could feedback the life of the city for planning and
adaptive design to improve the community  well-being, but also
device driven interactive environments with AR overlays that help
distribute the city's real-time narrative.The interactive role of
art and the city is a topic that I thrive on. I am a great friend
and fan of STANZA (wwww.stanza.co.uk) and his work such as The
Nemesis Machine – From Metropolis to Megalopolis to Ecumenopolis. 
  

    
Turning to Scoble and Israel's The Fourth Transformation: How
Augmented Reality & Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything.
AlpharGo Zero's recent achievement may prove to be a true
representation of discontinuous change in terms of the march towards
generalized artificial intelligence. Amazing that except from
programming in the Rules, there were no human inputs and
consequently no human thinking constraints. Although the recent
group of nine wise men including Kurzweil and Talinn and Musk,
Bostrom and co. felt that GAI was still a way off, but still
achievable within Kurzweil's 2035 prediction in the Age of Spiritual
Machines, some 20 years ago, the recent accelerated progress means
in my view that we should be already thinking beyond a purely
human-centric world and begin to consider issues such as
intelligence mutuality, future co-creativity, etc. Much will depend
upon AI designer progress in the area of intangibles (emotional
intelligence and cognitive aspects. I am of the opinion that AI will
self-generate many of these traits through trial and error and will
achieve higher cognitive skills in ways that we will not understand.
One of the topics I spoke on yesterday was "Think like an AI DJ' - a
take on my usual TLADJ rant. Beyond fears of killerbots, algorithm
warfare and crytocurrency corruption, we should focus our thinking
on how to create benevolent applications together with AI agents
that begin to answer questions around curing future diseases and
reducing energy consumption, etc. We need a lot of discussion on
roboethics and containing dominance by any one party. 
  

    
Good Gopod! (Our term for a higher power) Only seven responses in
and there is so much material. I'm overwhelmed and awed by you two.

Derek, as you read Patrick's posts, what jumps out at you? Patrick,
same question about Derek;s posts.

Derek and Patrick, Reality/reality? My joke is that nothing,
subjectively or objectively is in capital letters anymore. Most of
the time I feel like I am living in one of Rudy Rucker's cyberpunk
worlds.

We are redefining everything, while adding AI and robots to the mix.
Truly a "-brave New world". It is refreshing to sense the excitement
and deep understanding you both have for this time and space in
which we so fortunately find ourselves.

You both have alluded to the new skill sets all the 'players bring
to the table. The learning curve, alone, can be overwhelming. Derek,
corporations now have C-Suite Knowledge Officers and internal
knowledge gardens for their employees to develop. 

This question is for both of you. Do you have your own Personal
Learning Networks, in a structured way, or a mix of
intuitive/deductive toolkits that work for you. Have they been
cobbled together, a bit like a patchwork quilt, or do you find
software and platforms that do the job?
  

    
Also, I would like to talk about the elephant in the room - the
white boys club. You both travel the world. Is it getting better? Is
there a growing mix of cultures, subcultures, men and women, young
and old?

How have you seen this change over the years. Are women cracking
thru the glass ceiling? What's your take on the "politics" of tech
and the changing dynamics between coders, programmers, creative's,
managers, owners and content producers? What kind of ecosystem is
out there?
  

    
We have a few geeks here in the WELL. Please feel free to jump in.
It should already be clear that there is so much content here that
this will not be a linear conversation. I could use some help
panning for all the gold :)

Non-geeks are also most certainly welcome. Every opinion and
perspective is helpful. This technological transformation is
impacting all of our lives, all of our realities.

I will give us a day or two to talk about this among ourselves and
then invite folks from off-Well to participate.
  

    
Note to readers: post #5 was sent to Ted via email by Patrick Lichty.
  

    
"... we spoke of the role of sensor swarms and networks that could
feedback the life of the city for planning and adaptive design to
improve the community  well-being..."

Could just as readily provide a platform for surveillance and
control, I would think. 
  

    
This, from Patrick really jumps out for me:

> we have the
> danger of having localized subjective realities that are
> indistinguishable from objective reality.

It strikes me that Alex Reben's "Deeply Artificial Trees" can be
interpreted as a reminder that even our most personal 'objective
reality' is actually the product of a somewhat chaotic process of
trial-and-error pattern matching, constantly taking place just below
the level of conscious awareness.
  

    
Yup, squishy  ;)
  

    
re #13....this seems even more so given the advent of digital
realities...which loops back to Elon Musk's comments at the
beginning.

What does everyone think about this fractal reality, as James Bridle
like to call it; The blend of IRL, virtual, mediated or mixed and
augmented?
  

    
My grandchildren don't seem to give it a thought, they just roll
with it...is this an 'old dog' issue?
  

    
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Patrick responds:

Hi Ted and Derek!

I agree with Ted in that there is so much to chew on, and we’re just
getting started.  In regards to Ted’s comments regarding my
reflections on Derek’s, I playfully feel I should be consulting far
more than I do; I tend to be an academic/media commentator who
occasionally deals with policy.  I should be far more engaged with
this sector.

Thinking about Derek’s interstitial approach – i.e. Think Like an AI
DJ – there is a big challenge in the contemporary age. We can use
predictive indicators to get a lay of the land, but the scope of the
landscape has been growing exponentially as technoculture (and I
dare to possibly say Innovation) increases.  There is a point in the
1990’s where science fiction became near-future speculation, and
colleagues like Salvatore Iaconesi, Oriana Persico, and Bruce
Sterling have been pioneering NF Design strategies.  Therefore, the
person invested in the future is deeply involved in surfing, looking
for lacunae, dodging walls and grabbing disruptive technologies.
 
This is not to say that we should trust technology.  Thinking about
this, I have embedded within my soul a recording from the early 90’s
by a group called Earwax productions called “Virtual Paradise”,
which features Terrence McKenna and my friend Brenda Laurel and many
others.  It has vignettes talking about VR, talking about what you
want to do with it, from Terrence’s musing on concrete language, to
dark fantasies in the irreal.  One part has a refrain, ‘You can’t
stop it! It’s a very large juggernaut running out of control…” 
Humanity has this illusion of control; there probably no such thing;
just degrees of contingency we can manage.  But with heads like Elon
at the helm of world innovation, I would like to think that we are
not solely at the mercy of technological determination and market
dynamics.  There are heads of reason at the top who are calling to
not just let the bus drive itself, as we build buses that do drive
themselves. We are at the point now where humanity is geoengineering
the planet, and it’s the market that is doing it – it is a function
of blind intent, but the fact that it exists shows we can control
that.
 
What I see with AI, AlphaOne, etc. are a few curves that we need to
look at. Automation is at the intersection of labor and return on
investment (ROI) and in many cases there is capital concentration,
wage disparity, delaboring. With a booming population here in the
Eastern Hemisphere, there is a gorilla in the room; certainly. 
Artificial intelligence and efficient learning protocols versus mass
labor of brute force. Where I see things heading in the next 10-20
years is when value is finally drained from the labor pool.
 
And AI (sic) is sort of a First World issue that is being placed on
the emerging countries.  This has strange effects, like
communications leapfrogging as you have largely illiterate
populations vigorously using Facebook (Nigeria), and cell nets
totally leapfrogging POTS technology in Southeast Asia.  As I sit in
a country obsessed with its own sustainability, I think the UAE
should rightly be concerned with this. While I tend to be a bit
neutral in my assessment of automation except in matters like
weaponization of AI (which I feel should be strictly outlawed) I see
that the linkage of Ai, Automation and the markets will necessitate
new markets that are radically unlike those today, and perhaps that
is where Bitcoin/Blockchain will come in.  More on that later, as
I’d like to devote an entire missive to that, as I’ve been a fly on
the wall to conversations with the Government of Dubai and their
converting their document stream entirely to Blockchain tech.

But in the end, I think responsible voices need to be thinking at
the meta scale in terms that are not merely accelerating technology
for its own sake, as over half the world is not, by our standards,
technological. Solutions need to be created which are human in
scope, or perhaps Gaian, and not just technological.

In the end, the following will be true:
Life must be cared for.
The Earth is a closed system with Malthusian limits.
How can we use AI to account for this, and will we listen if it says
something politicians and captains of industry do/don’t want to
hear? What are the effects of mediation and AI on the world
populations? How do artists address these messages? Are we doing it
already?
 
  

    
re #18

<Therefore, the
person invested in the future is deeply involved in surfing, looking
for lacunae, dodging walls and grabbing disruptive technologies.>

On the mark! Sometimes I think I'm surfing the tecnocurve, other
times creating it, and other times about to be wiped out by the
tsunami of it...all good :)

<here are heads of reason at the top who are calling to
not just let the bus drive itself, as we build buses that do drive
themselves. We are at the point now where humanity is geoengineering
the planet, and it’s the market that is doing it – it is a function
of blind intent, but the fact that it exists shows we can control
that.>

That's a very optimistic view Patrick....Derek, how do you see it
all?
  

    
#18 (dont)

< With a booming population here in the
Eastern Hemisphere, there is a gorilla in the room; certainly. 
Artificial intelligence and efficient learning protocols versus mass
labor of brute force. Where I see things heading in the next 10-20
years is when value is finally drained from the labor pool.>

I was thinking yesterday that the AI's and Robots need a
union....they just don't 'know' it yet!
  

    
"when value is "finally" drained from the labor pool"

I would want to rephrase that a bit....from the labor pool that
exists at the present time....there are a lot of new kids on the
block, coming up..
I think we won't see clearly until today's 7 year olds have taken
the reins....and given their development, that could well start by
the time they are 10!!  But most certainly by the time they are 17. 

So, for me, the next 10 years is an opportunity for teachers,
parents, grandparents and significant others to establish strong
ties with these kids. It is their future and world after all. We are
just along for the ride.

Magic Bus indeed!!
  

    
<I see
that the linkage of Ai, Automation and the markets will necessitate
new markets that are radically unlike those today, and perhaps that
is where Bitcoin/Blockchain will come in.  More on that later, as
I’d like to devote an entire missive to that, as I’ve been a fly on
the wall to conversations with the Government of Dubai and their
converting their document stream entirely to Blockchain tech.>

Yup, plenty of gorillas to go around...and as David says:

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the
Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room
Is the Room
by David Weinberger 
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11581907-too-big-to-know)

This boundless cyberspace, or digital universe is the territory
which this driverless bus navigates....whoopee, and you don't need a
ticket to get on board, just any old connection will do; lo-fi,
mesh, etc.
  

    
Reading Jaron Lanier's newest Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters
with Reality and Virtual Reality.
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071RBPV1V/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o02_?ie=U
TF8&psc=1)

Great mix of history, vignettes, and deep thinking about the future
of humanity and tech.

He humorously gives some 50 plus definitions of VR as the book rolls
along; generally riffing off of science, jazz and cinema metaphors
and concludes that MR is where it is at in the short run....still a
lot of development to be done on the various delivery tools for VR
to be ready for mass market. So, Mixed it is!  For now. ;)
  

    
So having lost an hour's text, having been interrupted by beauty,
I'll start again. 
I mentioned earlier that we need to be seeing our world as one which
is not only human-centric. Beyond the issues of mutual
intelligibility and role reconfiguration, we need to develop a new
paradigm that provides a framework even a new schema for how we deal
with the interplay between humans, transhumans and non-humans and
parallel realities in terms of everything from interfaces, language,
intelligences, cultural attitudes, identities, etc. Single but
differing lifeworlds will ensue and we will need to break the
categorical schema by which we currently frame ascertain and
understand the intricacies of world order. Will non-humans have
archetypes? Certainly they will be have aa sense of hierarchy, even
if it is not in terms of the awareness humans expunge now. Human
input data hierarchy is obviously a given, but self-generating AI
will develop its own integrity. All three elements (human,
transhuman and non-human will expect recognition. This will require
a new layer of cultural transformation. As Bruno Latour believes,
material objects need to be included in social analysis. 
We already have wearables that understand tone of voice and plenty
of IoT with situation awareness through programmable surfaces,
therefore cognitive interaction. AI will develop cognitive in its
own way and its interpretation of what is a "soul" and how it plays
out will be intuitive to the AI rather than understandable to other
other than maybe technically. Transcribing algorithms into cognitive
behavior that are understandable to humans, but purely performative
in terms of the way they are generated by AI will be a major
challenge. So think of the role of an HR professional in the future.
The complexities of shared responsibilities, skill validation,
evaluation and determination will make shared labor or project/task
structures difficult to valorize. The opportunities for intellectual
advancement through human, transhuman, non-human collaboration are
enormous, but many see AI bringing in a new level of intellectual
retreat. The parallel realities I mentioned earlier are critical to
the division and valorization of labor. AI subsets like machine
learning, once they re self-generating and self-directing are
developing in their own "body", humans and potentially transhumans
when working in mixedmedia environments while somewhat disempowering
reality, will create a simulation of a new body of labor. It will be
critical to map the likely imperious rise of one of the three
manifestations of the "body".  Later I would like to discuss how
these potential redefinitions of "body" are reflected in
perspectives of our reality being simply a simulation. 
  

    
Derek, marvelous. Thank you for that consice recap.

Would you expand a bit on "integrity"; particularly your definition
of the word. And is that definition all inclusive for
humans,transhuman,AI, and post-human (should Kurzweil prove right)!