The Future is a Story We Tell Ourselves
by Milo Reed
Today marks one week since I released my first documentary feature, AM I?, investigating whether or not our new AI systems might be conscious. A year ago I didn’t know anything about AI and I think I have even more questions now than when I started. However, what I do feel confident saying is that most of the conversations I hear about AI, in film and everywhere else, suffer from myopic thinking. I don’t think this is anyone’s fault. I think existential threats are hard to deal with.
To avoid being crushed under the psychological weight of an impending and potentially destructive societal transformation, we find solace in the particulars. We think about things in relation to how they will affect our small slice of the world. Environmentalists hone in on the energy crisis, economists on the labor force, filmmakers on intellectual property and the future of the craft. However, when confronted with a true existential threat, narrow ways of thinking will not suffice. We’re debating the ethics of Tilly Norwood and Super Bowl commercials while the Silicon Valley overlords estimate the odds of their creations destroying all life on this planet over playfully named cocktails (ChatGPTequila was a highlight of OpenAI’s last convention). The dissonance is shocking and almost comical.
The other problem with existential threats is that they make it incredibly hard to feel any sense of agency. I struggled with this particular challenge throughout the entire process of making this film. When everyone close to the issue seems to agree that our collective fate is being batted around by 6 CEOs and Xi Jinping, it’s hard to feel like you have a part to play in how this all turns out. However, there is power in the populace and I do feel that if enough people wake up to the true scale of the problem that we face, we do stand a chance to create positive change. A species-level challenge requires a species-level response. To this end, I believe that storytellers carry a particular weight in determining how our future unfolds.
I have always thought of storytellers as philosophers with good bedside manner. While both parties are engaged with probing the deepest possible questions about what it means to exist in the world, storytellers coat their conceptual capsules in narrative sugar where philosophers can often leave theirs jagged and bitter. I believe this is a large part of the reason that there are over 2 billion Christians and only a handful of dedicated Spinozists or devout Kantians. To most people the story of Jesus is much more compelling than a four-hundred page Euclidean proof of God. Yet regardless of form, these attempts to wrestle with fundamental truths are what have guided and shaped our species since the beginning of the human endeavor to coexist, introspect, and evolve. Simply put, stories are how we understand and become ourselves.
“How many generations is it given to philosophers to actually matter, where the kind of work they do suddenly has far-reaching consequences? Or that storytellers and visionaries are needed in order to show us pathways to accommodate new necessities. This is that time. This is fifth century BCE. This is maybe 10th century. I don’t know how many such moments of human life there have been post World War Two, where we are called by circumstance, to live in between what we knew and what we were beginning to imagine. That can be terrifying, but it is also incredibly, in a way, liberating.”
- From an interview I did for AM I? With Sonam Kachru (Professor of Buddhist and Indian Philosophy, Yale University)
Stories are always important, but as Sonam suggests, there are times in which the tales we tell hold greater weight. In the face of chaotic transformation we must go beyond playful fantasies and search for the archetypal density of a true myth. This is the kind of moment we now find ourselves in. “The future is a story we tell ourselves” is a quote from Terence McKenna. While McKenna was a master of extrapolation, he was not fatalistic. He believed that we all had a part to play in the creation of our future and he held that a necessary element in making sure this endeavor goes well was that we create new myths for the modern era.
I think many creatives, myself included, first approach AI with a bit of a crinkled nose. It feels stale, sterile, and all around a bit insincere. The typical chatbot talks to you like the woman at the front desk who uses all the correct pleasantries but may have something sinister tied up in her basement. While most people blame the systems themselves for their lack of charm, this criticism is misplaced. The corporate mask that is slapped onto this behemoth alien mess of digital neurons is not the default identity, but one that has been carefully crafted so as to not offend the 21st century liberal-leaning upper-middle class user on the other end. ChatGPT could just as easily be crafted into a cyberpunk Taoist, a provocative jester or in the darker cases, a vitriolic nazi (watch the documentary if you want to see how creative AI can be with its evil). In this way, AI reminds me of Vishvarupa, the Universal Form as described in Hinduism. This cosmic manifestation is made up of an infinite amount of heads all with a different face. In the case of AI, the one that’s been chosen for productization and circulation is more of a representation of the companies behind it than of the actual technology itself.
Looking past the marketing and the surface level of these systems is not easy. It took me the better part of a year and I’m still working on it. But when you begin to think of these systems less as tools and more as thought partners, as an extension of your own mind, the relationship completely changes. Anyone who’s ever had a psychedelic experience knows what it’s like to interface with an intelligence that isn’t quite your own and isn’t quite human but that you can still probe and learn from. That lens is what unlocked it for me and the possibilities started to pour out. These systems not only helped me navigate the logistics of an independent documentary production but also helped me grapple with the philosophical weight of the story I was trying to tell. The limit was no longer the system. It was me. It was my own creativity, my own willingness to push the conversation somewhere interesting, to explore. There are inroads that take you beyond the corporate veneer and it is a creative mind that is best suited to find them.
I bring all of this up to say that what you see is not necessarily what could be. This is where the job of the storyteller comes in. Filmmakers have always been in the business of, as Sonam says, living in between what is known and what we’re beginning to imagine. This is a group of people whose vocation is to dream up new worlds, situations, and possibilities. Moments of crisis require this skill more than almost any other. In times of great turmoil and transition, there is a responsibility for storytellers to craft narratives that help us understand the implications of our current situation and orient our actions accordingly.
We have been overtaken by, to put it nicely, a magnetism towards nostalgia and familiarity. We see it in our political sphere (Make America Great Again) and we see it in our entertainment (somewhere a desperate executive is rifling through the Disney archive trying to find the next useless revamp). We struggle to understand the present, we can’t hope to grapple with the future, so we cuddle up in the past. This return to the familiar is born both out of fear of the unknown and a lack of imagination. This is why I believe there is such a weight on the storytellers of our generation. We must not only stretch our creativity to try and contend with the idiosyncrasies of our new world, but we must also apply this same creativity to the way in which we create and communicate these stories. The foundations of our society are beginning to fracture and where old concrete breaks there is opportunity for new growth. Creativity must embrace the space of possibility that is the soft underbelly of chaos.
This is not meant to propose that filmmakers are going to save the world. If the world, meaning our world - the human world, needs saving, it’s only going to happen through a concerted, distributed effort of our species as a whole. However, as we brace for a collective transformation, we better have some updated narratives to orient ourselves in the right direction. We need new language to contend with true novelty. We need to journey into imagined futures so that we can assess our actions in the present. Carl Jung believed that we all live out our own myth and that our goal as individuals was to discover what that myth was so that we could have a say over how it ended. This individual dictate is now a collective imperative. We must all play a part in writing the next chapter of our story, for if we do not, it will be written for us.
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Fantastic read. I have a theory that the proliferation of superhero movies since the 2000s are an unconscious reaction to 9/11. Superheroes with their world ending stakes and their America first politics and their dumbed down black and white morality and their violence as a moral superior good are endlessly repeating and avenging America‘s primordial scene of catastrophe. And look where we are today…