THE FUTURE IS BLOCKED TO US

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Codirector of Exhibitions and Programmes, director of International Projects, Serpentine Galleries, London; author, Ways of Curating

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In his poem of the same name (which also serves as the title to Adam Curtis’s seminal documentary), Richard Brautigan portends a future “all watched over by machines of loving grace” or, by implication, “thinking” machines. In what follows, I use the term thinking to refer to machines that think on purely algorithmic and computational lines—machines coded by engineers rather than machines that might, or could be, truly sentient.

Curtis argues that we’re living in a “static culture,” a culture too often obsessed with sampling and recycling the past. He implies that the Age of the Thinking Machine is resulting in ossification rather than renewal. As our lives become increasingly recorded, archived, and accessed, we have become cannibals driven to consume our history and terrified of transgressing its established norms.

To some extent, the future is blocked to us; we’re stuck in stasis; we’re stuck with a version of ourselves that’s becoming increasingly narrow. No thanks to recent tools such as “recommender systems,” we’re lodged in a seemingly endless feedback loop of “If you liked that, you’ll love this.” As we might become increasingly stuck in Curtis’s idea of the “you-loop,” so the nature of what it means to be human might be compromised by job-hogging machines that will render many of us obsolete. This Edge Question points to the next chapter in human history/evolution; we’re facing the beginning of a new definition of man, a new civilization.

An optimistic approach to the question of machines that think comes from the Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, who celebrates her ninetieth birthday this year. For her, thinking machines may think better than we do—to start with, because they won’t tire as fast as we do. They may also ask questions we’re not used to answering. Etel has said that what shook her most was of another order. Seeing a picture of a robot, a life-sized structure resembling the metal armory of a medieval knight, she immediately envisioned an old woman (or an old man) utterly alone, as so many of them are nowadays, having for sole companionship such a creature-like object, capable of doing things, of talking, and the old person falling in love with it, which made her cry.

The idea of machines that think plays a role in the work of another artist, Philippe Parreno, who works with algorithms, which for him have replaced cinema as a model of the perception of time. In the last century, Gilles Deleuze’s writings on repetition and difference in cinema emphasized that film unfolds in time and is composed of ever-differentiating planes of movements. As Parreno shows, Deleuze transposed those theories to discuss the mechanized and standardized movements of film as a means of reproducing or representing life. Parreno’s work with machines that think explores how, today, algorithms are changing our relation to movements, rhythms, and durations—or, to put it in Leibniz’s terms, the question will be, “Are machines spiritual automatons?”