I often feel like I’m oscillating wildly between believing (a) generative AI is a slow motion car crash that is going to destroy enjoyable work, human culture & public knowledge (b) we are in the early stages of an unprecedented expansion of human intellectual and creative capacities which is making me reevaluate my hostility towards posthumanism. I suspect I’m not alone in this almost violent sense of alternating between optimism and pessimism. I recently remembered something Susan Halford said in response to this experience when I voiced it at the BSA conference: this is what happens if you refuse to let your analysis be fitted into simplistic dichotomies.
I found this a really helpful thought. There’s such powerful intellectual and economic interests on either side of these dichotomies that it creates an inertial force pulling people actively speaking & writing on these topics in one direction or the other. But such dichotomies inevitably obscure the concurrence of positive and negative features in an ambiguous whole, as well as the range of potentialities inherent in technological developments and the sociological & political questions about which of these are likely to be realised. Fuck the dichotomies, let’s stake out the murky middle ground instead.
Mark Carrigan 