About
What are Generative Futures?
“The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience… But, in fact, there are actors!”
Joseph Weizenbaum
Technologies are malleable. The way they are used, and their impact, is not inevitable, it is the product of a negotiation between the people who use them, institutions, and the affordances of the technology itself.
Escaping techno-determinism
We chose the name Generative Futures because the debate about AI is currently trapped between two poles: inevitability (the belief that the effects of AI are unavoidable) and nostalgia (the desire to simply reject it). Both are dead ends.
The history of AI has been highly contingent. If it weren’t for GPUs, cheap capital from quantitative easing, cheap energy from fracking, and rising scepticism about social media, AI could have taken a different path. Many researchers believe the dominant approach, transformer-based language models, isn’t optimal; it simply won the “hardware lottery.” Diving into the details reveals how contingent our technological present is, and how malleable the future could be.
Whether technologies replace people or empower them is, as economists like Daron Acemoglu and David Autor argue, a political choice, not a technical destiny. “AI will not decide how AI is used,” as Autor puts it. “Its constructive and destructive applications are boundless.”
Understanding AI in order to shape it
The barrier to entry on the AI debate is currently too high, much as economics became forbiddingly technical before 2008, sidelining the political questions until a crisis forced them open. We think the technical AI conversation is similarly too narrow. AI is political, and keeping its technicalities reserved for a small group in the Bay Area is good for no one. Generative Futures speaks to people building AI and AI safety, and writes explainers that make those ideas legible to a wider set of actors.
A positive vision
Almost no one has articulated a positive vision for what comes after powerful AI. Without one, we risk defaulting to whatever emerges from market and geopolitical dynamics. As Milton Friedman observed, when a crisis comes, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Because we don’t know when an opportunity or crisis will arrive, we should start generating those ideas now.
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About the author
Phil Bell writes Generative Futures, a publication on the political economy of AI and how to build progressive technological futures. He interviews researchers at the frontier of AI and AI safety.