Beyond the machine ⊗ History as science

Beyond the machine

Frank Chimero with the essay version of a talk he gave at Kinference.

I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI as a designer without feeling like shit. I am fascinated with what it can do, impressed and repulsed by what it makes, and distrustful of its owners. I am deeply ambivalent about it all. The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over.

Thursday I gave a super short (4 min) talk to introduce myself at the start of what proved do be a varied discussion as part of La journée des savoirs ouvert (Open knowledge day). I mentioned Holly Herndon’s Collective Intelligence frame for AI and Brian Eno’s quote about that technology being in the hands of the wrong people. I was happy to see that Chimero also used them as part of his argument. As the quote above shows, he’s ambivalent about LLMs and has come up two interesting framings for them. First to think of it as instrument instead of a tool:

I find the instrument framing more appealing as a person who has spent decades honing a set of skills. I want a way of working that relies on my capabilities and discernment rather than something so amorphous and transient as taste.

He spends the bulk of the talk on how he uses spatial positions—working above, below, beside, or inside the machine—and using artists to illustrate each. Working below, basically vibe coding, means you are dependent on the machine’s outputs. He uses music producer Rick Rubin as an example of this position, where a lack of technical skill gets framed as enlightenment but ultimately makes you passive. Working beside the machine means cultivating its outputs, as Brian Eno does when he sets up generative systems, then selects and shapes what emerges. He treats the process like gardening, using ambiguous prompts to create interesting friction rather than polished results. Working inside the machine means composing through it by training models on your own material. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst demonstrate this approach by creating AI instruments from her voice and building systems that respect artist consent and compensation.

Finally, Chimero uses Spirited Away to explore AI’s appetite and boundaries with the No Face spirit, who mimics others by devouring them. The lesson turns on the difference between systems built on greed versus those built on enough.

Earlier in the piece, he talks about hoping for an AI autumn instead of a winter, “autumn is amazing; the air cools, the mania of summer dissipates, things slow down.” I’ll second that, and it tangentially reminded me of Jon Evans’ Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, which I shared a few weeks ago. It’s a smart take and the direction he picks could be seen as an autumn.

Eno often says while making music he feels like a gardener: planting loops and textures, then watching them sprout into something unexpected with the potential to become incredibly beautiful with a little bit of care and pruning. The machine may produce material, but the job of shaping it into something meaningful still rests with him. It is creativity as cultivation. […]

An average email or line of code is fine. Average art isn’t. To make something alive with AI, we have to resist its pull towards average by working beside it, shaping what it gives, and listening for what’s missing. Sometimes what’s needed is a good, old-fashioned mistake or two. […]

The lesson for AI might be similar. Its danger comes because it operates inside systems with no sense of “enough.” AI needs boundaries, and so do we. The question isn’t just “what can this machine do?” but “what should it serve?” and, most importantly, “when should we stop?”

History as science

The other part of the title of this piece is “how complexity thinking is transforming foresight,” which probably should read as could transform foresight. I’m also more intrigued than convinced. The theory is that patterns in history can be studied systematically rather than treated as random events. Peter Turchin, a mathematical biologist turned historian, developed cliodynamics—a data-driven approach that identifies recurring cycles across societies: integrative phases of stability and prosperity followed by disintegative phases marked by inequality and violence.

Applying this framework to contemporary America, Turchin argues that the United States has entered a disintegrative phase driven by three structural forces: popular immiseration (declining wages and mobility), overproduction of elites (too many educated aspirants competing for too few positions), and state fiscal distress. He predicted as early as 2010 that the United States was approaching rising political violence, a forecast that proved accurate by 2020. The approach doesn’t offer deterministic predictions but provides tools to model social forces, identify early warning signs, and test interventions before crises erupt. This could represent a shift from purely qualitative scenario planning toward what the author calls complexity-informed foresight—combining data analysis with narrative insight to create better maps of possibility and enable proactive action rather than mere prophecy.

Historians traditionally resist attempts to identify universal patterns in human affairs. History, they insist, is “one damn thing after another”—a succession of unique, context-dependent events. While history offers lessons in human nature and experience, the conventional view holds that it reveals no general laws from which the future could be inferred. […]

Turchin notes that political violence behaves like other self-organising natural phenomena—wildfires, earthquakes, or epidemics. In each case, small triggers can ignite large events if conditions are right. […]

That sentiment aligns closely with the ethos of foresight. Both fields seek not prediction, but agency—the capacity to understand the forces shaping our world and to act before crises erupt.

§ The abundance movement’s blind spot. “Herein lies an expanded narrative for the abundance movement. The most effective means of responding to climate change also enhances our physical and economic resilience: affordable housing that generates its own power and requires less energy use, communities redesigned to support a diversity of inexpensive transportation options, public greenspaces that double as critical infrastructure for heat regulation and flood management, the opportunity to grow your own food.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• New Horizons, Common Ground: Arup’s global horizon scan. “This report identifies three major dynamics that will define the future: Mass Vulnerabilities, Patterns in Flux, and Synthetic Landscapes. These themes explore the interconnected risks of climate change and resource scarcity, the disrupted movement of people and species, and the integration of digital and physical realms.”
• Future of Conflicts – A vision of what is to come. “This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative study of close to 100 foresight reports recently produced by NATO, its members and partners. These are placed in perspective alongside studies from adversarial countries, as well as narratives drawn from institutional science fiction.”
• Brain Health Futures Summit. “Brings together some of the world’s brightest minds in neuroscience, public policy, performance, workplace culture, and community design to explore how we build healthier brains - individually, collectively, and systemically.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• We’re doing AI all wrong. Here’s how to get it right (Sasha Luccioni). “Artificial intelligence is changing everything — but at what cost? AI sustainability expert Sasha Luccioni exposes how tech companies' massive data centers are burning through energy and wrecking the planet. She introduces a powerful alternative: small but mighty AI models that could flip the script and make the technology smarter, fairer and sustainable.”
• Artificial intelligence could dramatically improve weather forecasting. “They sent weekly AI-powered forecasts about the monsoon to 38 million farmers across 13 states in India. These AI forecasts predicted changes in the monsoon that all other ones missed. The forecasts of the timing of the monsoon were sent up to four weeks in advance of its arrival; conventional physics-based modelling usually can’t do it more than five days in advance.”
• Parents fell in love with Alpha School’s promise. Then they wanted out. “She became so frustrated at falling behind—not behind her grade level, but behind the rate of production she needed to complete her goals and possibly earn rewards—that she says she took it out on herself physically.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• The land that stores nearly a third of the world’s carbon. “Peatlands act as a crucial climate regulator, and are increasingly at the center of conflicts over resource extraction.” (Via nothing here.)
• Earth from Space: Chilean glaciers. “Located on the Pacific coast of southern Chile, the park covers an area of around 17 000 sq km and includes the Northern Patagonian Ice Field – a remnant of the Patagonian Ice Sheet that once covered the region. Today, despite the ice field being just a fraction of its previous size, it is still the second largest continuous mass of ice outside the polar regions.”
• Indigenous guardians successfully keep extractives out of Ecuador’s Amazon forests. “Mongabay visited the community to see their guardian program, made up of 45 women warriors who constantly patrol 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) of rainforest to detect incursions — which few have been allowed to witness firsthand.”

Asides

• Mother load! Narrative String Theory and Red string boards are conspiracy thriller staples. But are they real? (And Crazy Walls, but that one I already knew about.) I’ve always used “crazy walls” or “red string walls,” but I have to admit that “‘narrative string theory’ (string walls, walls and floors littered with paperwork by obsessives, etc.)” hits the spot. (Both Via Phil Gyford’s website).)
• NASA test flight seeks to help bring commercial supersonic travel back. Largely sharing this because, although not really alike, it immediately made me think of L’espadon in Blake et Mortimer. “The X-59 Quesst (Quiet SuperSonic Technology) is designed to decrease the noise of a sonic boom when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier, paving the way for future commercial jets to fly at supersonic speeds over land.”
• 62 modern tree houses climb to architectural heights. “Uniquely stunning, all 62 structures in Modern Tree Houses respond to the surrounding environment, whether a tiny, winterized pod for escaping the snow or a split-level playground complete with climbing ropes and nests. Built by architects and amateurs alike, each dwelling is varied in material, layout, purpose, and aesthetic, although all thrive because of their proximity to nature’s beauty.”