I'm interested in the way that various strands of this are coming together. One of the areas that I'm playing with at the moment is how conversations themselves age as against the technology they beget. I mentioned in a previous post an idea of conversations ageing in line with alchemy, as follows:
1. Embedded Certainty (late Rubedo)
2. Anomalous Friction (Rubedo destabilising)
3. Private Disquiet (Nigredo, the quiet before)
4. Shared Naming (Albedo)
5. Reorientation (Citrinitas)
6. New Coherence (renewed Rubedo)
There's probably quite a nice little circular graphic here about going from the complacency of embedded certainty through the friction back to "born again" certainty.
The area that interests me most, though, is II, III, and IV. The emerging friction leading to private disquiet and into the shared naming. That I think is where the really constructive conversations take place, and where nothing that we've done before quite fits. We can learn from all of it, but every transition is slightly different, as you are saying here. The purpose of the conversations is less about finding agreement than finding constructive, incremental disagreement that informs and inspires.
Thanks for this, Richard. A timely reflection. I wanted to build on your “AI as personal transport” insight, and tweak a couple of details.
Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez became quite a sensation about 12 years ago among the vanguard of the Digital age, the people pushing big corporations to adopt agile ways, DevOps, and all that jazz because her model clearly spells the dangers of not being early to the Deployment period party.
Being an economist, she collected data covering the last 250 years to shed light on the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages, which is the subtitle of her major work: “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital” (2002). She proposes 5 ages: Industrial (1771 - 1829), Steam / Railways (1829 - 1873), Steel / Heavy Engineering (1875 - 1918), Oil / Mass Production (1908 - 1974), Software / Digital (1971 - ?).
The average duration of the first 4 is 52 years. I’d like to propose 51 years for the last one, ending in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. The age of Digital has been in the Deployment Period for a while, defined as that period after the bubble bursts (dot com) when Production Capital takes the lead, rather than Financial Capital.
Financial Capital is at the helm of the Age of AI, currently past the first bit of the Installation period ((Interruption) and well into the Frenzy. Once the bubble bursts (who knows when) and regulation comes in, then the Tech Titans hope to inherit the Deployment Period of this age as well as the last one. All previous incumbents dreamt the same dream. We’ll see.
Perez’ model is also good in that it recognises Capital as the engine, not Technology. In her interlocked 3 spheres of change, the technological loop provides the seed, the motivation for the Economic loop to unleash the frenzy leading to the bubble, and then through Production Capital to motivate the third loop (Institutional) to change mores and ways of working. Which sets the scene for the next season, etc.
That’s the first tweak: I don’t think that AI is part of the previous technological revolution, in the Perez sense.
I really like your statement about the possible future of organisations being “less like modern corporations and more like Guild 2.0”. One reason that I like it (perhaps perversely) is that it implies an ecology where Feudalism 2.0 is also present. I’m thinking of the current global crop of populist authoritarians making inroads everywhere alongside Musk, Karp, etc. To be clear: it’s not that I like feudalism, I mean that I like your statement because it points to a possible ecological necessity of that as a consequence of an environment that makes Guild 2.0 feasible. Which is fascinating to think about.
So, yes, to AI as personal transport, with ChatGPT as the Model T of the species. My tweak is that I view consumer-level AI as a hobby, such as amateur radio or generating your own electricity: not a world-changing actor except in freak circumstances.
Ha! I just wanted to write a comment on my own with respect to the "AI as personal transport" metaphor. But much better to build on yours, Lain :-)
I think consumer AI, as in "AI used individually" will be much more than a hobby. It has the ability to become more serious, as its sophistication (tool use etc.) can make it very professionally usable. Same as the first cars were only a hobby, needed a lot of maintenance, and to actually carry any load you had to organize a lot of stuff around it, like fuel etc., which was not readily available. But these different things all came into being, and today you can leverage a car very well if you are an artisan, shopping materials (even if bulky), or use the car to go to trade fairs or conferences, and so on. I think a lot of things will evolve around the possibility to work individually. And only then will the car/railroad metaphor apply, with organizations still existing, but not everything will revolve around them.
For me, the same by the way may apply to producing your own energy, contrary to your assumption. One problem we have with "green" energy is exactly that the grid is built for centralized energy generation, whereas we have much more mechanisms now to decentralize that. That is changing/should change the architecture of energy distribution even in our still very normal circumstances.
On Perez: I have always found her view, or how it was interpreted, a bit dangerous, almost as if this were a universal pattern we can be sure to repeat itself. The twist I would like to make is that every such revolution rocks the boat. And it may naturally take 50 or 70 years for the boat to stabilize. But that remains true only as long as the boat does not capsize along the way. One could argue that Perez implicitly assumes that the broader capitalist system is stable. I would not want to see this as a given. It could become exactly feudalism or similar. Nice essay by Indy Johar on the "kill-line economy", where for most people, the margin of error is pretty thin: https://substack.com/home/post/p-183135150.
This may solidify. One could argue also that for example the great depression/WW II and related events were a "near-miss", and the fact that we see that it worked out is a bit of survivorship bias. We should not take a "next season" for granted. I do not quite get you when you point out that Feudalism 2.0 may become an ecological necessity? Certainly, I see it as a possibility, but what would make it "necessary"? The absence of good enough alternative ideas? I would see it as more likely that feudalism 2.0 comes about because the ones who would profit from it become able to steer things that way.
I'm interested in the way that various strands of this are coming together. One of the areas that I'm playing with at the moment is how conversations themselves age as against the technology they beget. I mentioned in a previous post an idea of conversations ageing in line with alchemy, as follows:
1. Embedded Certainty (late Rubedo)
2. Anomalous Friction (Rubedo destabilising)
3. Private Disquiet (Nigredo, the quiet before)
4. Shared Naming (Albedo)
5. Reorientation (Citrinitas)
6. New Coherence (renewed Rubedo)
There's probably quite a nice little circular graphic here about going from the complacency of embedded certainty through the friction back to "born again" certainty.
The area that interests me most, though, is II, III, and IV. The emerging friction leading to private disquiet and into the shared naming. That I think is where the really constructive conversations take place, and where nothing that we've done before quite fits. We can learn from all of it, but every transition is slightly different, as you are saying here. The purpose of the conversations is less about finding agreement than finding constructive, incremental disagreement that informs and inspires.
Thanks for this, Richard. A timely reflection. I wanted to build on your “AI as personal transport” insight, and tweak a couple of details.
Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez became quite a sensation about 12 years ago among the vanguard of the Digital age, the people pushing big corporations to adopt agile ways, DevOps, and all that jazz because her model clearly spells the dangers of not being early to the Deployment period party.
Being an economist, she collected data covering the last 250 years to shed light on the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages, which is the subtitle of her major work: “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital” (2002). She proposes 5 ages: Industrial (1771 - 1829), Steam / Railways (1829 - 1873), Steel / Heavy Engineering (1875 - 1918), Oil / Mass Production (1908 - 1974), Software / Digital (1971 - ?).
The average duration of the first 4 is 52 years. I’d like to propose 51 years for the last one, ending in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. The age of Digital has been in the Deployment Period for a while, defined as that period after the bubble bursts (dot com) when Production Capital takes the lead, rather than Financial Capital.
Financial Capital is at the helm of the Age of AI, currently past the first bit of the Installation period ((Interruption) and well into the Frenzy. Once the bubble bursts (who knows when) and regulation comes in, then the Tech Titans hope to inherit the Deployment Period of this age as well as the last one. All previous incumbents dreamt the same dream. We’ll see.
Perez’ model is also good in that it recognises Capital as the engine, not Technology. In her interlocked 3 spheres of change, the technological loop provides the seed, the motivation for the Economic loop to unleash the frenzy leading to the bubble, and then through Production Capital to motivate the third loop (Institutional) to change mores and ways of working. Which sets the scene for the next season, etc.
That’s the first tweak: I don’t think that AI is part of the previous technological revolution, in the Perez sense.
I really like your statement about the possible future of organisations being “less like modern corporations and more like Guild 2.0”. One reason that I like it (perhaps perversely) is that it implies an ecology where Feudalism 2.0 is also present. I’m thinking of the current global crop of populist authoritarians making inroads everywhere alongside Musk, Karp, etc. To be clear: it’s not that I like feudalism, I mean that I like your statement because it points to a possible ecological necessity of that as a consequence of an environment that makes Guild 2.0 feasible. Which is fascinating to think about.
So, yes, to AI as personal transport, with ChatGPT as the Model T of the species. My tweak is that I view consumer-level AI as a hobby, such as amateur radio or generating your own electricity: not a world-changing actor except in freak circumstances.
Ha! I just wanted to write a comment on my own with respect to the "AI as personal transport" metaphor. But much better to build on yours, Lain :-)
I think consumer AI, as in "AI used individually" will be much more than a hobby. It has the ability to become more serious, as its sophistication (tool use etc.) can make it very professionally usable. Same as the first cars were only a hobby, needed a lot of maintenance, and to actually carry any load you had to organize a lot of stuff around it, like fuel etc., which was not readily available. But these different things all came into being, and today you can leverage a car very well if you are an artisan, shopping materials (even if bulky), or use the car to go to trade fairs or conferences, and so on. I think a lot of things will evolve around the possibility to work individually. And only then will the car/railroad metaphor apply, with organizations still existing, but not everything will revolve around them.
For me, the same by the way may apply to producing your own energy, contrary to your assumption. One problem we have with "green" energy is exactly that the grid is built for centralized energy generation, whereas we have much more mechanisms now to decentralize that. That is changing/should change the architecture of energy distribution even in our still very normal circumstances.
On Perez: I have always found her view, or how it was interpreted, a bit dangerous, almost as if this were a universal pattern we can be sure to repeat itself. The twist I would like to make is that every such revolution rocks the boat. And it may naturally take 50 or 70 years for the boat to stabilize. But that remains true only as long as the boat does not capsize along the way. One could argue that Perez implicitly assumes that the broader capitalist system is stable. I would not want to see this as a given. It could become exactly feudalism or similar. Nice essay by Indy Johar on the "kill-line economy", where for most people, the margin of error is pretty thin: https://substack.com/home/post/p-183135150.
This may solidify. One could argue also that for example the great depression/WW II and related events were a "near-miss", and the fact that we see that it worked out is a bit of survivorship bias. We should not take a "next season" for granted. I do not quite get you when you point out that Feudalism 2.0 may become an ecological necessity? Certainly, I see it as a possibility, but what would make it "necessary"? The absence of good enough alternative ideas? I would see it as more likely that feudalism 2.0 comes about because the ones who would profit from it become able to steer things that way.