For The Wild - KENRIC McDOWELL on Designing with Cosmo-Ecological Intelligence ⧸164

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00:00:26.240 on. Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today on the show, I'll be speaking with

00:00:34.440 Kenrick McDowell, who has worked at the intersection of culture and technology for

00:00:39.220 over 20 years. Kenrick co-leads the Artist and Machine Intelligence Program at Google,

00:00:45.000 where he facilitates collaboration between artificial intelligence researchers,

00:00:49.480 artists, and cultural institutions. Kenrick is a regular conference speaker and consultant to

00:00:56.580 think tanks and arts organizations, helping groups connect artistic practice and technology

00:01:02.240 production with larger traditions of human understanding. Well, Kenrick, I am so grateful

00:01:10.100 to be in conversation with you again. It's so wonderful to be able to have dear friends

00:01:14.840 on the podcast. I really enjoy these conversations so much. And last September,

00:01:20.960 you invited me to the Guggenheim, where you facilitated a dialogue on art and technology

00:01:26.260 in the age of the Anthropocene, alongside support from Troy Conrad Therrien, Curator of Architecture

00:01:34.100 and Digital Initiatives at the Guggenheim. So this is such a wonderful way to reconnect. And

00:01:40.940 thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Thank you, Anna. Thanks for inviting me

00:01:47.200 to be on. It's been a great experience meeting you and being in a conversation. And the Guggenheim

00:01:54.700 event was a really profound shift for the type of conversations I've been able to have in public.

00:02:01.380 And so I'm really looking forward to continuing. I want to give the audience a little bit of

00:02:06.640 context to our chat at the Guggenheim. And we were in the lobby. And for those of you who know

00:02:13.500 the space, it's this incredible rotunda. And so we were all in this circle sitting on the floor.

00:02:20.800 It was really deep. And in this space, you asked all of us involved to think about the role that

00:02:27.620 technology plays in relating to our habitat and the future, as well as whether or not technology

00:02:33.340 can reintroduce slowness and renewal in our relationships.

00:02:41.840 The thing that I came to as part of a stream of work that happened early in AMI, where

00:02:49.740 we started working with philosophers to bring them in and help us understand what AI really

00:02:53.740 was, what we were projecting onto it as a culture, was to understand how much design

00:03:00.960 processes have embedded a certain set of beliefs about what a human is and what relationships are

00:03:07.120 and so we're doing some research now based on the idea that our current models really need

00:03:13.100 refactoring and I think we have some like really strong keywords to to discuss about things that

00:03:17.860 could be refactored but I want to kind of start from where we're working which is to say and this

00:03:21.660 is partly like my selfish motivation for getting this event together is to like get these ideas out

00:03:25.640 to people and see what comes back from our community but to say that when we think about

00:03:29.780 design right now we think about software we're thinking about essentially this is the conduit

00:03:35.880 which is a an interface to an individual person who has an email address a credit card and a

00:03:43.420 shipping address right so there's a certain degree to which we've like internalized this alienated

00:03:48.320 model we're not thinking about relationality and one of the things that comes up when you start

00:03:51.640 looking at AI and pattern recognition is the ways that patterns can be perceived that maybe not

00:03:57.480 weren't intended to be perceived so you know relationality we think is a really important

00:04:02.440 aspect of any kind of design paradigm so if we were going to reframe our thinking around design

00:04:08.420 we would move through relationality into our interspecies relationships and into ecological

00:04:12.600 ways of thinking so given that like we're people that are very much embedded within this urban

00:04:17.900 infrastructure it's not really something that we're all going to we're not going to all be

00:04:21.380 able to follow the path that you took but we what we can do is work from our own backyards and start

00:04:26.560 by looking at the disciplines that we're engaged in and figuring out how we're reproducing

00:04:31.600 embedded ideologies that were given to us about consumerism, entitlement, our sort of like alienation

00:04:39.020 from each other, from relationships, from our companion species, and from the ecosystems that

00:04:44.200 we are living in. So to back up just a little bit before moving on, you know, I see you working in

00:04:49.960 a very like interspecies context, right? And you were able to reflect to me how the individual

00:04:55.440 species when one collapses all of the others collapse with it that's one really important

00:05:01.080 piece of the puzzle and there were some other things that really speak to some of the discourse

00:05:05.760 going on in tech right now right like solutionism we were talking about the need to reframe concepts

00:05:11.920 of solving saving and idea of a solution and i think this is a space that might be tractable

00:05:20.100 for people here is to sort of like figure out how we can use our understanding of our disciplines

00:05:26.960 to reframe some of these concepts broadly and in general for the culture at large and i guess what

00:05:32.660 i'm arguing for is like people that work with ideas people that work with design really that's

00:05:38.420 where that's the tool that we have i really believe we need to come together to discuss

00:05:46.020 these questions regardless of our personas as artists, designers, engineers, or ecologists,

00:05:53.660 etc. Because we're all thinking about ecological collapse and resilience, and the time is really

00:06:00.500 ripe for fostering relationships in these incredibly polarizing spaces. So to begin,

00:06:08.740 I'm hoping we can acknowledge the extreme polarities when it comes to common opinions

00:06:14.240 on technology and ecology, and perhaps you can share what fed your desire to tend to the

00:06:20.980 intersection of these realms. Yeah, first of all, to say I couldn't agree more that now is the time

00:06:26.940 for us to be having these conversations about our shared stake in technology and ecology.

00:06:33.860 There may have been a time when the impact of technology wasn't felt globally, but that's not

00:06:40.900 the case anymore and the same goes for the ecological crisis this is these are things that

00:06:46.740 bring all of us together because we can't draw clear lines of ownership or responsibility for

00:06:57.340 you know we can draw we can draw lines of ownership and responsibility but they ultimately

00:07:01.720 include all of us the situation that we're in ultimately includes all of us and so it's really

00:07:06.420 important for us to be having this conversation and these conversations around these things that

00:07:11.320 belong to all of us the question of how i came to be interested in this i came into public speaking

00:07:21.120 and conversation largely through my role as a facilitator of collaboration between artists and

00:07:25.940 ai researchers and being at the intersection of culture and ai research it quickly became clear

00:07:35.180 how many complex ethical moral social factors come into play in the creation of technology

00:07:45.100 and in the deployment of technology and the use of technology so being involved in research it

00:07:50.900 became it became clear that there was a responsibility to bring voices into the

00:07:56.500 research process that could raise those concerns because the production of technology has largely

00:08:03.360 been done by people who are trained in technology and it's it can be a very narrow educational lens

00:08:09.460 if it's if there isn't some effort put in to broaden it so we started bringing artists and

00:08:17.000 philosophers in not just to produce their own projects but to consult our strategy teams and

00:08:23.420 to help us think on a deeper level about the assumptions that we bring to the production of

00:08:28.380 technology and to researching technology. So we've done workshops with philosophers around

00:08:34.060 ontology that led us to expand our definition of a user and to question our assumptions about

00:08:43.700 why we might only think about humans as users. And in that process, it became really clear that

00:08:53.000 we could start unpacking issues that were coming from other directions involving ecology through

00:09:01.540 the discourse of technology production and through understanding the assumptions that

00:09:07.260 we've brought to it because those assumptions of human centricity are not only in the realm

00:09:14.000 of technology they exist everywhere and so if we wanted to have a true philosophical investigation

00:09:20.280 of our practice as makers of technology, we have to unpack concepts that have been given to most

00:09:28.880 of the people in our community from other places, not just from technology training. So that became

00:09:36.840 a platform for exploring ways of understanding who the users of technology were, ways of

00:09:46.940 understanding our assumptions about human centricity and supremacy and ultimately

00:09:52.720 inevitably force us to think about ecology well thank you for that introduction and i'd like to

00:10:03.900 give the listeners a bit more context to our conversation last september and to ground the

00:10:10.520 conversation for the listeners i'd like to discuss the origins of human centered design

00:10:15.240 especially as it relates to computing and machine learning so i'm wondering if you could

00:10:21.120 sort of summarize the trajectory of human-centered design and speak to the initial necessity of a

00:10:28.380 somewhat counter-cultural hyper focus on human potential as well as how human-centered design

00:10:35.860 inherently limits relationability and interspecies connection yeah human-centered design originated

00:10:45.220 in the 70s as a response to engineered systems that didn't account for usability, for accessibility,

00:10:55.420 or for basically allowing humans to feel comfortable while using these devices.

00:11:03.960 So the notion of prioritizing human users in a machine context was really important for

00:11:12.420 making technologies accessible to people with different abilities, to making them easy to use,

00:11:20.060 to making them safe. But now we're in a context where human-centered design is predominant. And

00:11:26.620 so user experience design, for example, often makes use of human-centered methods of research

00:11:32.760 and trying to understand what our intuitive reactions are to things, how to make things

00:11:37.760 more accessible to all potential users. At the same time that human-centered design

00:11:43.940 has become the predominant paradigm, we also have the reframing of our geological era as

00:11:50.040 the Anthropocene. And there's really, if you look at it from a very basic linguistic point of view,

00:11:54.320 these things have something in common, right? Which is that the human is at the center.

00:11:57.500 As we start to introduce machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies into

00:12:04.100 these technological systems, we find that they have a capacity for recognizing patterns of

00:12:12.100 behavior, for recognizing patterns across systems. And as we start to consider possibilities for

00:12:21.120 using them spatially, for example, within architecture, we have to think about the

00:12:26.000 users human users in a relational context meaning if a pattern recognizing machine learning system

00:12:35.500 that tries to understand what it observes sees people interacting it will inevitably

00:12:40.780 understand their relationality because it's inherent in the situation or maybe not inevitably

00:12:46.820 but ideally it will understand their relationality because we've entered our current design paradigm

00:12:53.720 the human-centered design paradigm, really from an individualistic entry point, which comes from

00:12:58.880 a consumer model. But the systems that we live in are not individualistic, they're relational.

00:13:04.740 So when we start to think about human-centered design in a relational way, if we think deeply

00:13:10.960 about that, we will inevitably realize that our relations are not just between humans.

00:13:16.420 And this is where questions around ecology come in and questions around types of intelligence,

00:13:23.320 non-human intelligence that animals and plants have as machines gain some abilities that remind

00:13:31.580 us of human intelligence we can start to recognize that intelligence might not just be a human trait

00:13:36.840 and in fact it exists all around us so as these systems that learn start to try to understand us

00:13:47.280 to model the inherent relationality of the users that have been current up until now

00:13:56.220 framed as individuals there's a necessary expansion of the human center that really

00:14:05.240 comes from the nascent abilities of machine learning it doesn't i'm not saying that this

00:14:10.340 is an inevitable outcome this is something that we have a chance to shape now but the

00:14:16.120 convergence of this emerging capability within technology and the ecological and extinction

00:14:23.820 crisis as framed by the Anthropocene term really brings to the forefront the notion that the human

00:14:31.380 at the center is a limiting concept from which to be designing.

00:14:36.980 whoo preach that kenrick that's so i definitely agree with that and it's gosh every time i speak

00:14:48.340 with you i feel like i'm transported into a whole other world that my mind is usually not

00:14:54.860 hanging out in and so yeah i feel like i'm hanging on every word really trying to

00:15:02.180 get into this other way of understanding. It's so deep. And I'm remembering the sentiments you

00:15:13.000 shared as you opened up our dialogue at the Guggenheim, which in my mind is a call to

00:15:18.460 de-anthropocentrized design. So I'm wondering if you can share what you see the implications are

00:15:27.140 of continuing narratives of anthropocentrism when it comes to machine learning, technology,

00:15:33.160 and design, both within the field itself and in context to the extinction crisis?

00:15:40.120 Yeah, the anthropocentric narrative within design of technology, software, and of machine learning

00:15:50.620 really has a root in consumerist worldview. So if you take your phone,

00:15:57.140 And you look at what does your phone believe that you are?

00:16:01.600 It sees you as a series of taps on the screen.

00:16:05.640 And for most of the software on there, it sees you as an email address, a shipping address, and a credit card.

00:16:13.600 And that individual, the assumptions about that individual, the assumptions about what a human is, that a human is that individual, and that that is what the definition of an individual is.

00:16:22.300 those assumptions are really deeply baked into so much of our culture that it's really hard to

00:16:28.660 escape them when thinking about potentially more complex systems like machine learning.

00:16:34.240 So when we propose that we might expand the human center of design thinking, we confront not just

00:16:46.120 the problem of thinking of ourselves as the center of the world, which we've inherited through

00:16:50.500 various traditions, but also thinking of the human center as an individual center, as a consumer

00:16:57.500 center. We have to really undo multiple layers of thinking to get there. And one of the challenges

00:17:03.360 that surfaces these multiple layers of thinking is when thinking about a design paradigm that

00:17:09.480 would include non-humans, plants, animals, elements, ecosystems, it's very hard for us to imagine

00:17:17.200 because none of those entities have credit cards

00:17:21.220 or bank accounts and they can't pay for things.

00:17:24.560 And this is one of the fundamental challenges

00:17:27.580 is how do we, if we want to expand the human,

00:17:30.920 we have to expand the human beyond our consumptive ability

00:17:35.440 and our existence within the economic system.

00:17:38.800 Even thinking about humans relationally

00:17:41.400 does that to a certain extent.

00:17:43.900 But when we expand to relations

00:17:45.800 that don't exist within that system, then it challenges the framework of that system.

00:17:51.500 And so we've had experts come in to speak to us about ecosystem services, economic models,

00:17:57.060 how those work, how people try to quantify the use value of an ecosystem, which in this

00:18:04.000 context sounds really profane, but then within the context of economic modeling, there's

00:18:08.880 no representation of those systems.

00:18:10.860 and there are questions arise in our engagements our academic and philosophical engagements around

00:18:19.100 what does it mean to try to represent those things economically should that be done can it be done

00:18:25.540 does quantification of ecology is that a wise thing for us to be doing is it even possible

00:18:32.600 to model and understand ecology on a certain level of granularity it is but you know i'm not

00:18:39.660 talking about scientific research i'm talking about building urban frameworks building infrastructure

00:18:45.320 how does quantification or the attempt to quantify the real or nature in those contexts how does that

00:18:52.360 introduce errors into our own modeling how does it you know an example that came up recently in

00:18:57.780 a class was someone was asking about personhood and certain ideas that with technology natural

00:19:05.560 environments might attain some kind of digital representation but that immediately brings to

00:19:11.040 mind the question of what it takes in terms of resources in terms of computation to actually

00:19:17.200 represent these things and whether it's worth spending those resources to try to do that to

00:19:22.200 try to integrate them into the system and ultimately if modeling computing ecology is

00:19:29.420 done from the point of view of profit-seeking entities, will it become just another mechanism

00:19:35.600 for control?

00:19:59.420 My wings reflect her light as I fly over treetops to my home, home at the top.

00:20:19.520 Off the mountain, I've sung up to a fountain of wisdom

00:20:33.240 Where I saw

00:20:49.520 I've been in my own world struggling with this concept of quantifying and in the non-profit

00:21:04.440 industrial complex in the world of the non-profit there's a lot of desire or even

00:21:12.480 requirements to quantify impact and it's really challenging when something like impact or

00:21:20.440 relationships or the natural world is kind of confined or conformed in a quantifiable model

00:21:31.780 so much seems to be lost and i don't think the things that are lost

00:21:37.740 you know my first reaction is they'll never be able to be quantified in a type of

00:21:42.940 human created system because it's something beyond that and that unquantifiable

00:21:50.180 whatever it is energy relationship plant whatever it is it's it's like that's that's magic that's

00:21:59.740 something that in a way i feel like we shouldn't even seek to fully understand because we never

00:22:04.860 will. But then I also am hearing what you're saying and, and wondering, is this something

00:22:11.160 that we even want to try to integrate into these systems? And I definitely do not have the answer,

00:22:18.480 but it's a really, yeah, it's a good mental gymnastics workout. And I feel like in order

00:22:28.100 to design differently, I'm gleaning that there are two areas that we really want to attune

00:22:34.100 ourselves to if we want to negate our anthropocentric tendencies. One being that design

00:22:41.260 needs to take place in recognition of relationships, identifying that all users as

00:22:47.460 relational beings. And then the other being that we must broaden our understanding of intelligence,

00:22:53.740 or maybe perhaps abolish our metrics of it altogether. So within the realm of design and

00:22:59.760 technology. Can you speak to these tightly tethered connections between creation,

00:23:05.660 relationship, and intelligence? What you're saying about relationship, I think this is

00:23:11.980 really the key to understanding, for example, what you're talking about with the unquantifiability

00:23:18.220 of certain aspects of being, basically. If we open ourselves up to learning from cultures that

00:23:25.620 have a more balanced relationship with nature, I think we'll find that the idea of quantification

00:23:33.780 or the idea of understanding is mitigated through a type of relation. So a relation of humility

00:23:42.480 in the face of nature, and also a relation of openness to not just the unknowability,

00:23:50.000 but the novelty of nature so whether through ritual or narrative worldviews there are precedents

00:24:00.120 for relating to nature in a way that allows it to be as infinite as it really is having said that

00:24:08.400 There is this deep drive within our culture to understand through metrics.

00:24:17.220 And I guess my hope is that we can build a relational way of understanding measuring that allows us to stay open to the infinite novelty of nature and open in a humble way to the unquantifiability of it.

00:24:41.200 meaning we won't try to produce a totalizing rational system that erases the mystery,

00:24:48.860 but actually we can still use those systems in some productive way

00:24:52.720 while knowing that we are working with a model without making our models total.

00:24:57.560 And the ability to do that really, I think, has a lot to do with

00:25:01.420 how we include other models in our thinking, right?

00:25:06.920 So if we're building up this kind of total, perfect, quantified, rational understanding, it's often for the purpose of a single point of view. And I think the first step, relationally, is to open up to other points of view, to begin thinking.

00:25:23.760 You know, for example, I've done some work with the philosopher Yukui, who's got a very productive framework for thinking through technology, which he calls cosmotechnics, and builds on the idea that technologies embed their cosmology in them as they're propagated.

00:25:41.780 He's looking at it from an East-West perspective and looking at the way that Western technologies are entering China and proposing ways that China might embed its own mythos or ethos or belief into the production of technology there.

00:25:57.560 But the same could be applied on a north-south axis on multiple axes.

00:26:01.480 And when we start to diversify the points of view around modeling, then we can start to see that each of those models has different priorities and that one of them isn't the perfect one.

00:26:14.820 So there may be an ability to enrich our modeling while understanding its limitations. I think that's really the core of a lot of this is understanding limitation and accepting limitation and accepting that our own limitations provide an experience. By accepting our own limitations, we can have an experience that goes beyond those limitations, but we can't believe that our models are going to be perfect.

00:26:44.820 there's this question that has come up for me gosh i don't even know how to really put into

00:26:55.100 words but it's interesting as humans how we're constantly searching for something and i and

00:27:02.960 maybe also as as modern humans this search is so much outside of ourselves and our community

00:27:10.180 and our relationship to the land and yeah just trying to understand things in this rational

00:27:17.900 reductionist way to maybe feel comforted thinking that we know something or you know I'm just trying

00:27:26.300 to I like feeling this existential question come up around even just the desire to try to fit these

00:27:35.780 complex ways of being into models? And what is that going to get us? Where are we trying to even

00:27:42.040 go once we think we understand something in a way that we can categorize and quantify and so on and

00:27:49.180 so forth? And while I really want to embrace this call for a relational model, part of me is torn

00:27:57.700 in that I question whether or not these holistic models improve well-being for our benefit or

00:28:04.680 ultimately just aid in the selling and consuming of services and products, something that you

00:28:10.000 mentioned a bit before, and whether or not that distinction even needs to be made.

00:28:15.780 So yeah, I guess what this gnaws at is this larger question I have around whether or not an

00:28:23.340 ecosystem-centered field of AI or machine learning is compatible with capital, or will the field of

00:28:31.320 technology ultimately prioritize the creation of systems that generate a profit? I totally agree

00:28:37.600 with the existential question that you're pointing to. I think, you know, partly there's a few things

00:28:44.380 that I think we're seeking in trying to like understand or map. One of them is a sort of

00:28:50.800 existential security or control. And one of the lessons I've learned over and over is that you

00:28:56.100 don't have control and you can't have control and i think this is really on a on a deeper level

00:29:03.660 beyond the questions of how to implement anything in technology or whether we should this is the

00:29:07.920 this is the question is how to be in relationship with life and the earth in a way without needing

00:29:16.800 to be in control without needing to know what's going on necessarily really how do we actually

00:29:21.460 just be and that deep anxiety that many people feel around that is expressed exactly as you've

00:29:29.660 been describing it. I think another thing that we're looking for and trying to maybe reproduce

00:29:36.760 through technology is embedding within a social context and embedding within a terrestrial context

00:29:45.080 and those things if they're not present we won't be able to produce something meaningful or helpful

00:29:50.420 with technology if we're erasing those things or not, or if those needs are not met. So I share

00:29:57.320 your concern. I share the experience of that tension of, you know, we can build a more holistic

00:30:04.500 model. We can think through these questions in a more ecological way, but if we are unable to

00:30:14.260 be without controlling or knowing or resting in the mental model that we've created if we can't

00:30:22.780 just be we'll produce that anxiety again through our technologies and if we don't have social webs

00:30:29.860 if we don't have relationships terrestrially if we don't exist in a web of life then we will

00:30:39.060 also reproduce all of those same problems and in many ways these provocations or these proposals

00:30:46.640 you know i work in strategy and in many ways i work at the edge of what strategy can do so these

00:30:54.140 proposals are radical in the sense that they you know that the team that i'm working with is very

00:31:00.000 interested in proposing radical alternatives that challenge deep assumptions and one of the

00:31:07.060 lessons of working in strategy is that the majority of what you do is probably not going

00:31:12.580 to be realized. So speaking about these things or putting this out, there is a way to surface

00:31:21.280 the complexity and to stay with the trouble rather than maybe an actually putting forward

00:31:27.420 these radical proposals might show us the limitations of what we're able to produce

00:31:32.700 within the currently existing system and working in strategy you have to come to terms with the

00:31:39.320 fact that a lot of what you propose or do will not be realized so these are ways of breaking

00:31:47.140 apart our thinking that that they may not be perfect solutions i want to shift this conversation

00:31:53.680 to discuss the culture wherein tech is cultivated and how this impacts design and perhaps we can do

00:32:01.920 this as a precursor to discussing the need to slow down, which is something we've talked about

00:32:07.940 a lot in our personal conversations. And I'm thinking a lot about how the culture of the

00:32:14.260 machine learning and technological advancement has been cultivated in a space that has and

00:32:20.740 continues to really repress the sacred in all of its embodiment. And as well as how the culture

00:32:27.840 of tech today is hyper-focused on efficiency, so much so that it denies us the luxury and the beauty

00:32:34.840 of waiting, patience, slowness, and honestly even boredom. So perhaps you can share what you think

00:32:43.620 this means for bridging ecology and technology in terms of surrendering the quarterly model based

00:32:51.480 on immediate gratification and reviving something slower and more long-term and where do you find

00:32:59.720 the practice of slowing down? Well you pointed directly to it at the end of the question by

00:33:04.900 talking about the quarterly model. A lot of times the scenarios that say engineers or designers find

00:33:10.920 themselves in are ones where they're in competition with each other to perform and the way that that's

00:33:17.220 understood as through metrics. And the easiest metrics to point to are the ones that speed

00:33:23.400 things up or make things more efficient. But when we think about what even just the Anthropocene

00:33:29.740 framing is presenting to us, it's a picture of humanity existing at a certain timescale or our

00:33:35.680 actions existing in a certain timescale. And the confrontation with that almost unimaginable

00:33:43.480 length of time that so many of these materials that we've produced will have the timescale at

00:33:49.780 which our actions are living now really challenges the quarterly model it's almost too hard to think

00:33:57.580 so our strategy team has been thinking about what framework could we use to start to think about

00:34:03.740 different temporal scales and so you know i'm really answering not from the personal side but

00:34:08.300 from the professional side like how do we actually address short-term thinking and we have a

00:34:14.360 framework where we kind of make a grid with at the top spatial scales with the human at one point but

00:34:21.540 the ecosystem at another point the microorganism at another and then temporal scales with the human

00:34:27.020 lifespan maybe in the middle and geologic time at one end and the life cycle of a bacterium or

00:34:34.640 something at another end and we've been producing these workshops where we help people use this

00:34:42.300 framework to challenge the way that they're thinking about design but again the quarterly

00:34:48.220 model is a profit one it's based on quarterly reports economic reports and what i've seen

00:34:55.680 working in the cultural sector is that even cultural projects need much more time than a

00:35:00.640 corporation will allow so you need a couple years to see a project really through and just the

00:35:06.060 introduction of that notion that like we actually are building something bigger here has been

00:35:11.580 productive but it's something that you have to kind of concentrate your effort on doing and

00:35:17.640 i've seen even within our team like as we've started to think this way we've shifted a little

00:35:22.660 bit our focus on a day-to-day level of how to work meaning let's allocate more time for deeper work

00:35:29.380 and less time for shorter meetings etc and so there are lots of small ways to do that as well

00:35:36.780 as strategic ways for thinking what is the impact of this product that we're working on in not just

00:35:44.300 a quarter or a year but 10 years or its full life cycle including the materials that it's made from

00:35:50.440 and i'm working with a colleague on some metric systems now that where we're attempting to

00:35:55.920 introduce those in a systematic way into a kind of prospective product analysis i have had to

00:36:03.460 reprioritize and really focus on which aspects of work my own work personally creatively

00:36:13.700 professionally like how all of those things which aspects are really rewarding me in a sustainable

00:36:19.240 way because there's a lot of needs to be met and working at the intersection of these different

00:36:24.520 spaces there's a lot of opportunity to be present but ultimately as an individual I need a deeper

00:36:32.140 sustaining resource and so getting deeper into my own practices that provide that for me has been

00:36:38.000 a way to slow down and to to learn to see opportunities against a longer time scale

00:36:45.500 just within my own personal lifespan or even within like a five to ten year personal time

00:36:51.760 cycle, but also like that does build up to understanding where your energetic investment

00:36:57.180 is and how that might, how you might begin to think intergenerationally as a starting

00:37:03.080 point for moving beyond your own time span.

00:37:21.760 Lizard dreaming on a stone

00:37:29.180 Singing calling me back home

00:37:40.000 I'm everyone, I'm everyone, I'm everyone

00:37:46.240 I'm a funeral

00:37:51.140 I live inside the sun

00:37:54.740 I'm everyone

00:37:58.080 I'm everyone

00:38:00.060 I'm everyone

00:38:01.960 I'm an animal

00:38:07.000 My time has just begun

00:38:09.980 and i think the slowing down in design and and how you were saying that a lot of the strategy

00:38:24.340 that is created doesn't always get implemented and part of me thinks good even in my own projects

00:38:30.620 i'm always grateful when i spend a lot of time strategizing and researching and development and

00:38:37.560 don't always take the physical steps to actually realize it because not everything needs or should

00:38:44.000 be realized at this time because everything takes resources. And I think it's part of this

00:38:49.280 instant gratification, consumptive, stranglehold, addiction, whatever we want to call it to

00:38:57.500 think of something and then implement it almost immediately. And that is really dangerous in so

00:39:05.280 many different ways, whether we think the project we're creating is benign or not. And yeah, I

00:39:11.280 appreciate that slowness in thinking things through and thinking about future generations,

00:39:18.040 because I think that definitely is something we've lost in this dominant Western model that

00:39:24.540 it's all about now. And it's all about what we can see directly in front of us. And that

00:39:31.140 has been really detrimental. And I have been thinking about, along with slowness, how we can

00:39:42.440 turn to play and design. And I feel like one of the greatest interventions might be restoring

00:39:50.360 playfulness into practice. And so I'm wondering, what does this look like to you in terms of

00:39:57.080 creating technologies that embody care? And even perhaps, yeah, how can technologies even embody

00:40:03.100 care? That's a really good question. When you think about care, and I think play as well,

00:40:09.660 there is an inherent relation in there, right? Like when we care, we care for an other and we

00:40:15.520 care for ourselves as well, but often it's for an other. And maybe the key to starting to understand

00:40:23.820 And technology in that way is to see it as something that has the potential for shaping relations, right?

00:40:31.660 I mean, we've lived through this era of social media so far and relations have been shaped in a certain direction through design priorities that emphasize visibility and exposure and likes and impressions and stuff like that.

00:40:47.200 But there is a relational element to that. And could we bring care into something that has this inherent relational structure built into it? I think whatever it is that, however that happens, care happens relationally. So it's going to need to exist there.

00:41:03.340 i can see like within architecture opportunities to consider care and relation of the users of

00:41:14.100 architecture this is a space where environments can be hostile they can be easy to use they can

00:41:19.340 provide for our needs they can be full of care and this is one area where the where you know i've been

00:41:25.900 working with academics and architecture for a while and this seems to be an area where there

00:41:31.940 could be some interesting engagement with technology or that there will inevitably be

00:41:36.340 an engagement with technology so the question becomes then how do we make that a good one

00:41:40.660 might do just on a very basic level like spatially the challenge of architecture when it comes to

00:41:46.660 computing is that the user isn't the individual that you kind of see through the phone camera

00:41:51.660 it's a group of people and that implies these elements like care being present and these

00:41:58.940 elements of sociality one of the things that keeps coming to mind is some research i saw recently

00:42:04.040 pointing to the need for social embedding and for networks of care in absorbing climate change

00:42:15.460 understanding so you know i can see opportunities at the intersection of architecture design creation

00:42:25.580 of technologies that would take into account sociality and help provide frameworks for

00:42:31.580 coexisting with other people that could help mitigate some of these some of the information

00:42:37.460 that we're having to understand some of the understanding we're having to absorb help us

00:42:40.840 deal with the current context and i haven't spoken much about play which is something that's

00:42:46.520 in your question i mean that's really how i came into this space of working with ai was

00:42:51.920 by working with artists and seeing their playful relations with AI. I mean, there's also critical

00:43:01.140 relations. There's also poetic relations within artistic use of AI, but what really is obvious

00:43:08.700 when you bring an artist into the research setting or the corporate setting is that

00:43:14.180 their impulse is playful in comparison to the type of normal motivations of research. There's

00:43:21.280 some play involved in it sure but in general their artists come in and say well couldn't we do this

00:43:25.920 and then people are like well why would we do that and they're like well just because you know

00:43:29.380 that's what i want to do that seems like that's what's interesting here that would be a fun thing

00:43:34.180 to do that would be a weird thing to do that would be a beautiful thing to do and those

00:43:37.700 modes of operating and those those motivations are are are not very present in a lot of technology

00:43:46.420 production so you know having artists come in to show us the fact that we're not doing those things

00:43:51.300 has actually been very helpful it's like play challenges efficiency and i appreciate that

00:44:01.220 in some ways just to kind of shake us out of the forward motionness of work and yeah thank you for

00:44:13.960 speaking to that. And also in preparing for this interview, I came across an instance where you

00:44:19.580 explained your responsibility to the sector of work and that it's both careless and a privilege

00:44:26.600 to back away from this realm altogether. And so often we hear conversations where it's proclaimed

00:44:33.140 that we don't need this. We don't need any of what technology or artificial intelligence has

00:44:39.140 to offer us, and why even bother with it? And perhaps there is a great deal of truth to that,

00:44:45.300 but that doesn't change the fact that we have it, that society has given birth to this age,

00:44:52.100 to machine learning, that we're just as dependent upon these intelligence systems

00:44:57.700 as we are to fossil fuels. So I'd love to ask you to speak to your own journey when it comes

00:45:05.320 to grappling with the responsibility that we have to the likes of artificial intelligence

00:45:10.720 yeah it's funny to think about like when you ask about like my own journey I guess I'll just share

00:45:17.480 this story it's a little personal but I remember I had come from New York and driven out west I'd

00:45:25.040 given away everything I owned and moved into a van with my partner and driven out west and this was

00:45:30.880 about 2011 and ended up after settling in a few different places in seattle and i was

00:45:37.680 sitting outside of a place where i was working which was a you know i was going through this

00:45:44.200 thing where i was like really questioning like money at all you know like what how does it even

00:45:49.660 exist like what why and through circumstance ended up having to get a job at a place that

00:45:57.000 lent money to jp morgan so fate was really kind of like giving me these like polar experiences and

00:46:03.760 i was outside of that place i was smoking some tobacco and contemplating like all the things

00:46:11.940 i had done in my life and feeling like i had kind of washed ashore and like run aground and feeling

00:46:16.580 really kind of without agency and i really questioned what i cared about and i really

00:46:24.680 cared about changing the system that I was in and I had been making an active effort to drop out of

00:46:30.780 it as much as I could and it wasn't successful and so at that point I decided to I had been a

00:46:36.780 freelance software engineer for about 17 years probably at that point and I decided to go get

00:46:42.280 a job in product design because I felt rather than becoming an activist in a conventional sense I

00:46:49.660 didn't really have any capacity to do that in specific but i could go into design and i had

00:46:58.480 a pretty high degree of agency in that because of the work i had been doing so that was the point

00:47:04.520 for me where i sort of i guess took responsibility for the career that i created or really committed

00:47:14.080 to being an agent of change within that system was after a sort of half-hearted maybe attempt

00:47:21.440 to pull myself out of it and realizing that like there was no outside to my experience as a

00:47:28.120 participant in capitalism as much as I would have liked there to be like I was really just reducing

00:47:34.280 my agency within it and so that was how I personally came to that but I agree it's a

00:47:42.000 a little bit of a chicken and an egg scenario where you're like should we be fixing this should

00:47:47.540 we be stopping it and there is power in computation there is the ability to do more

00:47:56.840 and so the question of like what it is that we do with it is really important and in many ways

00:48:02.540 goes unasked or gets masked by the nascent ideology or the latent ideology of silicon

00:48:09.080 valley which has roots in the counterculture which has roots in the human potential movement

00:48:12.980 and often kind of presents its utopian face you know i think in the last few years we understand

00:48:18.560 how flimsy that is but for decades it was a the silicon valley ideology was able to sort of surf

00:48:25.820 on its countercultural credentials that somehow imbued it with a at least a humanistic good so

00:48:33.200 yeah there's a lot to take responsibility for as a participant within that and I guess maybe one

00:48:40.360 question it's important to ask ourselves is am I a victim in this situation am I subjected to these

00:48:47.020 things and where is my agency in how I interact with them you know when it comes to like social

00:48:53.520 media for example it's something I've like largely quit using you know I do use Twitter to keep up

00:48:59.760 with news and things like that. But I, I found that as I pull out of it more and more, my own

00:49:06.180 engagement was, was what was producing the ability for me to be manipulated by it. And there's

00:49:11.500 obviously reasons to use those tools. And I think an important skill for us all to develop is to

00:49:18.480 understand like when manipulation is happening and to learn how to not participate in our own

00:49:23.440 manipulation i was snapping for you in my mind with that i'm such an important point to understand

00:49:33.820 how we are feeding our own manipulation or feeding into the things that we feel victimized by

00:49:41.700 and i do think there are things that are by systemic design and we are in a sense

00:49:49.960 controlled by it outside of ourselves and then i also know that we are the ones who also keep the

00:49:57.680 machine churning because we keep buying into it in multiple different ways and so balancing those

00:50:05.520 two sides of knowing that there is systematic oppression happening and also knowing that we

00:50:11.760 all have responsibility especially as modern for those of us who are in the dominant culture

00:50:17.700 are feeding into this system that we also want to take down simultaneously. And it's so

00:50:22.860 challenging, especially I know for a lot of activists out there who,

00:50:29.280 and I know for myself too, I do live a modern life and I do have an iPhone and I do have social

00:50:35.540 media. And sometimes I feel so thrashed by it. And there's a lot of guilt, a lot of frustration,

00:50:42.720 but also a lot of convenience and a lot of things that I have become so accustomed to having.

00:50:50.520 And sitting in that discomfort is really important for our growth, for those of us who want to

00:50:58.000 see through this. And I think the points you made around, yeah, responsibility and manipulation are

00:51:05.760 just so at the core of what we need to be considering when we decide to kind of create

00:51:13.200 our belief systems around these larger narratives and, and yeah, elements of control. And I think

00:51:21.860 we also need to recognize that AI is, to talk more about AI is still being developed and it's

00:51:27.800 not fixed. So, and I guess technology in general. So I think we need to recognize that AI

00:51:35.420 is still being developed and it's not fixed. So as we near the end of this conversation,

00:51:41.660 which I wish could last forever, I would really love to ask you about your work with artists and

00:51:48.040 machine intelligence as an interdisciplinary liminal space that is very much committed to

00:51:54.080 the exploration of machine intelligence and relationship. And yeah, do you think that

00:52:00.480 deepening this relationship addresses the damning narratives put forth around AI and technology

00:52:07.200 as a hazard to our health and humanity? And if so, what work needs to be done to ensure that

00:52:13.880 the relationships being tended will also address the reality that AI already poses a substantial

00:52:19.420 threat to marginalized populations and those who already experience the greatest burdens of

00:52:24.500 inequality well artisan machine intelligence has been a site for these interdisciplinary

00:52:32.280 conversation it has been a liminal site and it's allowed voices to critique and to be heard and to

00:52:41.420 express new possibilities that definitely would not have come about in a traditional research

00:52:46.020 context now is that changing things on some level it probably is but it's a cultural program

00:52:55.180 and culture art as something that represents or addresses certain things isn't necessarily

00:53:05.480 that empowered within the tech world so there's a discursive freedom that we have and there's

00:53:13.620 an ability to critique and to generate new ideas, that certainly has an impact. And I can say that

00:53:18.300 the leadership in the group that I'm in have really had transformative experiences in conversation

00:53:24.040 with artists and philosophers that have changed their approach. And would I like to see more of

00:53:29.320 that in every tech context? Absolutely. Do I think that it's enough to right the ship? I don't.

00:53:38.380 There's lots of on-the-ground work to be done with representation within tech companies and bringing voices into the process, hiring people that naturally have different experience from the majority of tech creators.

00:53:55.200 Those are fundamental things that we can't ignore that will help.

00:53:59.860 And I think the questions, there are questions that go much deeper than AI in specific that need to be addressed, but AI will help us surface.

00:54:12.320 AI is for many people a mirror of belief, meaning that the cultural image of a powerful mind that doesn't seem to have a body, that has some ability to control our environment in some way, is essentially a god.

00:54:32.580 And people have projected all kinds of different things onto AI as a sort of mirror of their own belief.

00:54:41.640 And this, I think, is a very powerful function of AI as a rhetorical tool and as a cultural device.

00:54:47.520 It also becomes a mask for it to wear.

00:54:51.040 And the true making of it is much different than that.

00:54:54.880 But when people come to this technological context, when people talk about AI and it brings up these assumptions, that's a good site to intervene or to discuss why those assumptions are there.

00:55:08.840 when people imagine as sort of all-powerful singular ai that watches all and has punitive

00:55:16.460 abilities and knows everything they're really reflecting a certain construction of what

00:55:22.020 deity is and it's really important to understand like why we bring those beliefs to the table

00:55:28.000 when we talk about ai because that's what's happening all over for everyone that's making

00:55:33.580 it these beliefs these implicit beliefs are being brought to something that can have a lot of

00:55:38.840 capacity for receiving projection. So, you know, there's so much to be done, but how we do it and

00:55:46.200 from what set of assumptions we're doing it, it's really critically important to surface and to

00:55:51.580 understand. And one way of doing that is by being in diverse relationships with people that have

00:55:59.200 different views than our own. So different views from their own life experience and different views

00:56:04.740 of different assumptions that they bring to this mirror of AI.

00:56:13.560 So interesting to think of the belief systems we put on technology, this godlike figure.

00:56:20.280 It's really, yeah, I think I had thought about that before, but hearing you say it really

00:56:25.020 stuck with me this time.

00:56:27.620 And the last area that I want to revisit from our talk is on grief as a portal.

00:56:34.740 but now even more so than before, because I'm thinking about the complexity of this grief and

00:56:41.580 the opportunity of this complexity, how the earthly experience, as I was reminded at the

00:56:48.880 Guggenheim is never solely benevolent. It isn't perfect. It's chaotic at times, and it's always

00:56:55.120 intertwining. And I see so much similarity between that complexity and the discourse around

00:57:01.260 technology. So in closing, I'd love to ask you how you navigated this complexity, especially as

00:57:08.920 someone who remains really committed to straddling the worlds between magic, ecology, and technology.

00:57:17.340 I guess when it comes to navigating and straddling worlds, you know, a couple, I guess, grounding

00:57:24.380 points come to mind one thing i haven't really spoken a lot about is politics but i think trying

00:57:33.440 to bring all of these other dimensions of experience into lived reality rather than

00:57:42.260 maybe like a purely rhetorical space requires grappling with very complex systems whether

00:57:50.760 they be technical or political and appreciating the mundane and the inherent trickiness of all

00:57:59.940 of that and bringing it from theory really as participating in the process of creation is a

00:58:05.980 way of bringing these theories and these ideas into practical embodiment and that i find very

00:58:12.120 grounding that there are these constraints that are technical there are constraints that are

00:58:17.940 political and at the end of the day something is going to happen and something will be made

00:58:24.320 and knowing you know rather than pretending that those constraints aren't there like allowing them

00:58:30.640 to be helpful or allowing them to scope down the sort of like infinite possibility or chaos

00:58:36.840 potentially of all of this is i guess part of the practice for me i know a lot of academics and

00:58:43.740 that's a really important piece of it too but i'm trying to bring this into into reality

00:58:48.800 against these contexts i think is also very grounding for me and then the other thing that

00:58:55.960 comes to mind is really just drawing from my own experiences through meditation through working

00:59:02.400 with plants that have shown me how much more there is to reality than kind of what we do

00:59:10.740 experience on the mundane day-to-day level and trying to stay grounded in non-dual awareness

00:59:19.600 trying to stay grounded in awareness that there's more happening than what we can see while at the

00:59:26.400 same time staying grounded in that awareness is something i it's something i check in with every

00:59:31.800 day but it's also something that is made more meaningful by having these contexts of mundane

00:59:39.700 reality to enrich. And we do, I believe, need to find deeper connections with one another and with

00:59:47.560 the earth in order to make any decisions that have a holistic approach to them. And I do think we

00:59:53.180 need more holistic approaches. You know, we're up against a lot, but when we come together and

00:59:59.320 we're able to be more fully engaged in what is, like the solutions and the brainstorms that can

01:00:06.540 come out of that and the friendships is beautiful like I I think about that all the time when I let

01:00:13.680 the grief in of course like I'm I feel so much grief and pain and overwhelm but at the same time

01:00:21.060 the amount of pleasure connectivity love beauty that I'm able to take in at the same time it's

01:00:28.280 not that they cancel each other out it's just that I'm actually able to become a more expansive

01:00:32.760 and open human in that way and and so yeah i mean there's so much to it and i could you know ramble

01:00:38.540 on but i'll i'll pause there well yeah i mean something you said about processing this grief

01:00:44.200 and letting it sort of transform your life is really critical i think for people that are trying

01:00:51.120 to negotiate these problems through their practice and if you're even if your practice is large-scale

01:00:56.180 infrastructure or architecture or media there's a need to understand the situation clearly and

01:01:04.640 like i think there's a lot of tendency towards abstraction within the disciplines that like

01:01:08.140 for example i engage with i think a lot of people here there's a need to be very abstract

01:01:12.120 like as a policy maker you need to be very abstract to deal with the scales of human life

01:01:16.920 that you're influencing as a technologist you have to be abstract for obvious technical reasons as

01:01:22.540 well but there's something about letting yourself move through this process so that you can see more

01:01:28.760 clearly what you're working with and I think there's a what I got from some of the conversations

01:01:33.300 we had is that we are a little trapped in the models of the world that we have that we are

01:01:37.320 afraid of letting go of the model because it means we have to experience some pain collective pain

01:01:43.060 but as we do that once we let go of the model once we experience it and process it we can move

01:01:48.000 into a space where we have a better vision of what's going on and when we can see more clearly

01:01:53.480 we can actually start to act with real agency and real effect because right now we're if we don't

01:01:57.620 process it we're kind of beating against this kind of model of the world so that we don't have to be

01:02:02.800 like in the presence of this grief right and the way you described it when we were talking was that

01:02:08.640 that transformative process I mean for me it was something that happened over like 10 years but

01:02:13.680 really only very recently did I find a way into thinking with my own discipline and it became like

01:02:19.880 what you described it was a portal to joy or to beauty or to agency or new types of creativity

01:02:24.380 and this portal I think is the promise of this climate grief experience I mean collectively

01:02:31.160 obviously but also individually too right or maybe vice versa like maybe it's more obvious for the

01:02:35.200 individual but the collective when we all in mass like take it on through a synthesis of

01:02:43.200 using our systemic analytical understanding which is so highly developed amongst many of the people

01:02:48.520 here and the people that we know and our sort of like experiential need to like engage with the

01:02:54.720 earth as a living thing to sort of surrender to these like larger forces and not be sort of the

01:02:59.060 master of reality then perhaps that portal is the way you know that's like the thing we need to keep

01:03:06.220 our our eyes on as we go through the process because it's i think it's also like grieving

01:03:10.560 it's a fractal process right like that you go through a certain part of it and then a year

01:03:15.140 later you're kind of reliving that part again but at a different scale and etc etc so it seems like

01:03:20.600 an essential tool from what i've learned from you in our conversation is for kind of like getting

01:03:26.560 to design strategy is actually dealing with the felt experience of the faulty system at scale and

01:03:34.740 in relationship with each other and in ecological interspecies relationship as well like we're not

01:03:39.340 going to be able to be good urbanists if we're not feeling what happens because of urbanism

01:03:46.380 and like that seems to be a major rift in the disciplines that I'm engaged with that

01:03:53.080 is kind of being called to the surface

01:03:56.060 through all of this experience.

01:04:02.440 This has been such an incredible way

01:04:07.280 to spend time with you in these deep conversations.

01:04:12.360 Every time I speak with you,

01:04:14.040 I feel like I'm pushing the walls of my mind

01:04:17.820 and stretching.

01:04:20.020 and it's yeah I just appreciate how much you're able to hold and understand and weave together

01:04:27.720 and I feel like you consider so many things that I know I take for granted every day things that I

01:04:36.580 just you know technology and things that I just use without really thinking things through or

01:04:43.900 what the phone is even thinking of me I mean there's things that you said in this conversation

01:04:47.840 I'm like, whoa, I have never even considered that. And so I really appreciate the complexity that you are holding and the integrity in which you do so. And it's been so fun to talk to you again. And if there's anything else that you'd like to say, or if you feel complete, it's been, yeah, it's been a really wonderful, challenging and expansive conversation.

01:05:13.660 well thank you hannah so much for the multiple conversations we've had i'm really grateful that

01:05:20.320 we became friends and i hope that your listeners responses and feedback can somehow find their way

01:05:30.220 to me or i can i can learn through their reactions to what they've heard in this conversation because

01:05:36.800 you know, this is all a process and I'm trying to learn through it as well. So I really appreciate

01:05:45.500 the space that you've been holding for me to be able to think out loud with you. Thank you.

01:05:56.660 Thanks for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast. I'm production team member

01:06:01.380 Carter Lou McElroy, and the music you heard today was from South London Hi-Fi, Bad Snacks,

01:06:06.300 and Kenry. I'd like to thank our host and founder Ayanna Young, as well as the rest of our podcast

01:06:11.880 production team, Aidan McRae, Andrew Storrs, Erica Ekrem, Erin Wise, Francesca Glassbell,

01:06:20.340 Hannah Wilton, and Melanie Younger. If you enjoyed today's conversation,

01:06:25.960 please rate us on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcast. If you'd like to stay up to date

01:06:31.500 with our projects and offerings, subscribe to our newsletter by visiting forthewild.world.

For The Wild - March 25, 2020

KENRIC McDOWELL on Designing with Cosmo-Ecological Intelligence ⧸164

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