How the future might be less digital. Hopefully. Probably.
Morning pages. just do it!
Look around, everyone on the street is on their phone. Including me. We're all somewhere else, all the time right? We built the most powerful communication tools in history and use them to.. avoid eye contact?
Positive AI take: AI might fix this. Remember the movie 'Her'? Which sounds insane coming from someone who talks to machines fourteen hours a day.. Bear with me.
The problem isn't technology. The problem is our tech is needy as hell. Your phone demands your eyes, your hands, everything. Screens were a necessary evil. We hadn't figured out how to talk to computers yet so we had to stare at them. Tap them. Type with our thumbs like psychopaths.
But what if the machine got smart enough you didn't have to look at it anymore? I'm living a scrappy version of this already. Every morning I write morning pages on my reMarkable. No apps, just pen and paper. An AI agent I built at home reads my handwriting, pulls out the to-dos (bottom of page), puts them where they need to go. Pen on 'paper', morning light, coffee. The machines do the admin in the background.
And this one's my favourite. Every time I finish a film or a book or come back from an exhibition, my AI agent nudges me on Telegram. Just asks me how it was. And I talk about it using 'Wispr Flow' on iphone, out loud, stream of consciousness, whatever comes up. Normally those thoughts just stay inside your head or you forget about them two days later. Now they get captured. Claude turns my rambling into a clean entry in a Notion database. Every film, every book, every show. My personal banga list of little slutty pieces of art haha. Like a nerd hoarding little nuggets of wisdom I can actually go back to and apply to my work later.
On a recent commercial we projected AI-generated backgrounds live on set. Actors could actually see the world they were reacting to. No performing to a tennis ball on a stick. It kinda merged the digital with the physical because the DoP was inspired to light in coherence with the plate. And the other way around, I could respond with new plates to what he was doing on set.
Maybe the best thing AI can do isn't more immersion into machines. Maybe it's becoming invisible. Letting us look at each other again. (you need to delete social media tho!)
What piece of technology would you love to never have to look at again?
