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Max ·

To me the future of technology is a lot closer to Bret Victor’s vision of computational public spaces than private and centralized AI black boxes and middlemans, that try to get as much data about us as possible. It’s the complete antithesis to today’s narratives about technology.

I especially enjoyed comparing the values of urban design and computing. It’s also a bold claim, that we will always give up our privacy when computing is bound to screens, but probably true. And lastly, it’s such a good observation that we managed to build a somewhat democratic and civilized society based on very complex infrastructure systems, but never managed to make these systems transparent and visible to us, so that we can understand and therefore govern them.

Our brains haven’t changed in a hundred thousand years, but we’ve built this very complex society around ourselves, and we’ve decided that we want to collectively govern it.

We can’t do that, if we can’t see or understand how any of this works.

Bret Victor [40:30]

📺 Youtube video
Bret Victor talks about computational public spaces
Max ·
Max ·

Even the end of Daft Punk is a symbol for integrity, vision and humanity. Thomas Bangaltar explains their decision to stop Daft Punk:

"My concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence go beyond its use in music creation," he says, suddenly serious.

"2001: A Space Odyssey is maybe my favourite film and the way [Stanley] Kubrick presented it is so relevant today - because he is asking exactly the question that we have to ask ourselves about technology and the obsolescence of man."

That's always been his position, he stresses. It's just that people sometimes misinterpreted Daft Punk's aesthetic as an unquestioning embrace of digital culture.

"I almost consider the character of the robots like a Marina Abramović performance art installation that lasted for 20 years," he says.

"We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology."

That's why 2021 was the right time to pull the plug on the project.

"As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."
Max ·