Speed

The Race for AI in a World for Living

The Issue

We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed.  (Marinetti, 1909)

So begins the Futurist Manifesto—and a movement that romanticized the machine and reveled in bombastic technological determinism—just five years before the horror of World War 1 and the rise of Italian Fascism. 

Today—only 116 years later—there is a race to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) amidst greater complexity and in view of more significant challenges, risks, and uncertainties. The race is both geopolitical (between the US and China) and economic (among AI companies). 

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Why it Matters

In a recent New York Times interview, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI will be better than humans at most tasks between 2026-2027, or before the close of the decade at the latest. He goes on to worry that society will not be ready but does not define readiness. 

He says:

I’m just worried that it’ll be a shock to people when it happens. And so the more we can forewarn people — which maybe it’s just not possible, but I want to try. The more we can forewarn people, the higher the likelihood — even if it’s still very low — of a sane and rational response. (Amodei)

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The Dominant Narrative

Amodei also says: “…the default state of nature is that things go at maximum speed,” suggesting that the only means of moderation is via regulation and oversight—enough to manage risk but not so much as to limit the benefits. He argues for a nuanced approach while others (including the current administration in the US) are advocating fewer rules and greater acceleration. 

Implicit in this assertion is the systemic logic of capitalism and the underlying myth of technological progress—the lingering inheritance of modernity absent the lessons of history and blind to its externalities and contradictions. There is also a pervasive belief in the inevitability of AI as a general-purpose technology (AGI) and faith that the benefits will outweigh the costs. This is the default state—but nothing about it is natural.

The dominant image of the future is one where AI accelerates scientific discovery, cures disease, mitigates climate change, and creates economic growth—along with catalyzing dramatic social change and radical systemic transformation (the implications of which tend to be left open). 

The future is speed minus vision.

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“Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, for we have already created velocity which is eternal and omnipresent.” (Marinetti, 1909)

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Alternative Narratives

I previously wrote about the risks of multi-vector systemic collapse that emerge in a world where AI replaces a large number of knowledge work jobs, based partly on the implications of rapid economic acceleration and assumptions about the capabilities of emerging AI systems that would be present in such a world.

You can see that here. 

This is a complex domain and much more that could be said—but for now I want to focus on the issue of speed itself, because I think it’s a provocative place to reconstruct narratives and imagine new futures.

In Post-Growth Living, philosopher Kate Soper makes the case for “alternative hedonism” as an alternative image of the future. She writes:

At a time when some economic theorists predict a terminal decline in capitalism’s powers of accumulation, and when the environmental obstacles to growth appear insuperable, it becomes urgent to renew an earlier tradition of positive thinking on the liberation from work, and to associate that with an alternative hedonist defense of the pleasures of a less harried and acquisitive way of living. The reduction in work needs, in other words, to be seen as an essential condition of relieving stress both on nature and ourselves. (Soper, 2020)

Can you imagine an economy oriented toward human and planetary well-being? 

My sense is that it would be much slower—driven more by the rhythm and cycles of life and less by the artificial construct of time as money. Imagine the role of AI in this world. There would be more emphasis on safety—a different weighing of responsibility and risk. 

Going further, I wonder whether the aims of the technology would be different. For example, would research be directed toward critical issues like climate over competitive advantage? How might AI be designed to augment human flourishing instead of productivity? 

What kind of future do you want?

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The Big Question

Do we have the agency to create slow futures? Would we do it if we could?

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Endnote

Speed is deeply embedded in the logic of capitalism—so much so that we tend to accept social acceleration as if it is a natural phenomenon. If we want to create better futures it will be necessary to shift this worldview and its underlying values. We need to open the space for something new to emerge.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes:

…to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. (Pirsig, 1974)

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References

Marinetti, F. T. (1909). Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo. (Le Figaro)

Pirsig, R. M. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Quill.

Soper, K. (2020). Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. Verso.

On the cover: Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Grand Prix of the Automobile Club of France, Course at Dieppe. 1912.

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The Dialectic is an exploratory short-form newsletter about emerging narratives and transformative futures.

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