Artificial Intelligence
It took me over a year of making software with AI to finally understand what I think of the next era of technology: software is dust. I can make software. So can you. Whose software is better? Nobody knows. Our appetite for making software has grown, but people’s appetite for consuming software evidently hasn’t. As a result, it has never been this easy to make bad software. It has never been this hard to make enduring software.
At first, I felt a little devastated at this reckoning. I started my career as a modest software engineer in 2013 and went on to spend over a decade building, launching, monetising, and growing software at exciting companies – entertainment and tech at Netflix, mobile games at EA, etc. Throughout my career, there was an almost sacred “scarcity” to software. We took pride in our ability to make or shape it. Over the past year and a half, as I made more software with AI, I realised that the first thing AI torched was that “scarcity”. Nothing I made, no matter how creative, could shake the feeling that technology today matters much less than culture. After all,
AI can make an image. Culture decides whether anyone wants to look at it.
AI can produce an app. Culture decides whether it becomes part of somebody’s life.
AI can recommend a restaurant. Culture decides whether it becomes a place people visit for their dates and reunions.
AI can generate a song within seconds. Culture decides if anyone remembers it.
AI can make things. Culture tells us what to make, why it should matter, and how it becomes a part of human life, if at all.
So, I started noticing the world around me a little more closely. It helped that I moved to London in the same timeline as I started making things with AI. I came from India, a country that even within my own lifetime has undergone so much technological disruption that it is difficult to remember what life was like before mobile data changed how we travel, eat, order, shop, play, work, and communicate. London, in comparison, felt less “technological” and more… communal.
Here, I travel by trains and buses instead of cabs.
On a beautiful day, hundreds of people sit in parks alongside each other, nibbling on snacks they picked up from one of the many fun department stores present in every neighbourhood.
Even the most expensive experiences I have tried here have been in shared third spaces – fitness and wellness classes, saunas, spas, and the works.
Kids of all ages and ethnic backgrounds play together in carefully designed public spaces.
Public entertainment thrives in niche festivals across film, music, food, and culture.
Bookshops are never empty, people spend hours tending to their minds and souls with a croissant and cup of coffee.
Libraries and small venues are frequented by artists and teachers selling in-person workshops and classes for all age-groups.
Even advertising lands differently. I find myself enjoying the process of discovering brands from the beautiful billboards, posters, and typography splattered across London’s double-deckers, walls, tube stations, and handwritten signs outside shops.
I look over at people’s phones on the train (sorry). I observe which shops they enter and which ones they don’t. I see which store aisles run busy and which ones tend to stay empty, and what people carry around with them on long commutes for work or leisure. I notice the toys most kids seem to adore. I wonder about the return of big cameras. I speak to people as the sons and daughters, parents and siblings they are or want to become rather than as “users”. It has been a while since I engaged with society this deliberately. My tech career in “product” taught me all about being “user-first” and “bridging” the business with customers, but I had forgotten that “users” are humans at the end of the day, like you and me.
Culture
In all the futurism about AI, we are forgetting the art of studying “culture” – the operating system for how humans collectively decide what to admire, buy, make, celebrate, imitate, reject, remember, and pass on.
In reality, the easiest way to look into the future is to live in the present, because through the shared language of culture, the world is always telling us what it wants and what it doesn’t.
If AI gives us possibility, culture gives meaning to that possibility. This matters, because the big question is no longer whether we can make something, but whether or not we should.
From a cultural standpoint, it does seem that the world at large is ambivalent about AI. In a Gartner survey, 57% consumers said AI-generated content had made them less trusting of brand messaging. McDonald’s had to remove an AI-generated Christmas ad within days of its release, after receiving heavy criticism from consumers who felt that the ad ruined their festive spirit. AI may have successfully delivered the artefact, but it failed to deliver the meaning.
Many technology futurists detest this reality because they expect people to be more patient as AI perfects itself, while some prefer to almost look down upon the ambivalent ones as “normies”. I fear this attitude does not bode well for our industry, because if we want to make something people want, then it is important that we respect what people don’t want.
We do not have to reject AI to meet people where they are. But once we recognise that what people really need are better ways to think, play, create, connect, belong, understand themselves, and make a life – we can make and talk about our work in a language that sounds like us.
AI, or any technology for that matter, then becomes an ingredient in the pursuit of human joy, rather than the whole story.
Generative Culture
Machines have always been our friends for calculating, fetching, communicating, and finessing. Today’s machines produce images, music, language, code, characters, environments, words, and more. They are moving from being instruments for human-making toward being systems that participate in producing the object itself. In this new “generative culture”, the role of the machines changes from tools to co-creators. Naturally, there is a furore about it.
Social discourse is erupting. Politics are fracturing. Ecological anxiety is rising. Existential questions about employment, purpose, and work are afoot. Intellectual property, a matter that humans never could quite settle, is now an active debate of ethics. Fears about the future weigh heavily upon us.
For many, this era is too absurd to take seriously. Others see nothing but impending doom.
It is tempting to look away from such a world. It is tempting to disengage and take comfort in nostalgia, cynicism, or abstraction. It is tempting to become indifferent.
We mustn’t. Because… Amor Mundi.
Amor Mundi
Amor mundi is a Latin phrase that translates to “love of the world.” In traditional Christian thought, it represented a dangerous attachment to earthly, transient, and sinful mortal things instead of the eternal love of God. However, 20th century political philosopher Hannah Arendt famously reappropriated the phrase to mean accepting, engaging with, and taking responsibility for our shared public reality even with all its historical horrors, flaws, and injustices.
In 1955, Hannah had written a letter to her mentor, Karl Jaspers:
“I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world… Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.”
In 1958, the book was instead published under the name The Human Condition.
Hannah’s version of Amor Mundi is neither a romantic yearning for an ideal world, nor a proclamation of blind optimism. Instead, it is a much harder, more deliberate decision to not look away. To remain interested in the world even when, especially when, it disappoints you. To stay attached to its people and places, its stories and objects, its beauty and its mess. To care enough about the world to keep looking at it, thinking about it, arguing with it, building it, sharing it, and taking part in it.
When you consider that Arendt fled Nazi Germany in 1933, spent years in exile in France, was interned there in 1940, and eventually escaped occupied France and arrived in the United States in 1941, her ethos of love feels especially inspiring. She had experienced political catastrophe firsthand, yet refused to surrender to nihilism or despair.
I find in Hannah’s life and work a radical proposition: that surviving a broken world requires us to remain stubbornly, actively engaged with it.
Natality
Hannah’s philosophy of Amor Mundi neither obligates us to like this world uncritically, nor to reject it contemptuously. It simply requires us to face it, exactly as it is.
We do not need to believe that technology will make everything better. Nor do we have to pretend that the present is exciting simply because it is new. Perhaps radically, I also don’t think the answer is to predict “abundance” when the reality says otherwise. But there is something we can still do.
We can choose.
We can choose to look at a flawed reality and remain part of it. We can choose to argue with it. We can choose to care about what happens to it. We can choose to repair and renew anything we can. We can choose to find something worth making or something worth saving. Whenever possible, we can choose to add something to the world rather than retreat from it.
Hannah had another word that I find fascinating: “natality” – the human capacity for new beginnings. In contrast to our mortality, natality is a reminder that every person who enters the world brings with them the possibility for novelty. Each one of us is capable of introducing something new and unexpected into the world. The capacity does not promise that things will get better; it simply means that the future can never be predetermined.
Cinematiq: A technology and culture studio
Cinematiq has been over a year in the making. It started as my personal container for experimental projects. Today, I am building it as a technology and culture studio for living creatively.
We publish ideas, build products, and collaborate with brands. We are for people who care about culture and believe technology should enrich human life. Together, we want to shape what it means to live, care, and create in the new world.
We Are “Initium”
As human beings, there are some things that we cannot do, no matter how hard we try. For example, we cannot know whether what is coming will make the world better or worse. We cannot control what we inherit. We cannot escape responsibility for what we leave behind.
But we can remain present, curious, and attentive.
We can care for what is here, and keep an open mind for what might come next.
Above all, we can begin things. In her concept of natality, Arendt described humans as initium – newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth. To take initiative, to introduce something new into the world, is fundamental to our being.
It is imperative that we use the tools of our time to imagine, create, question, play, repair, learn, and do-over when necessary… not because it will make the future necessarily better, but because we are still here, and this world is ours to build.
I present this not as a manifesto of optimism or futurism, but as a commitment to the world we live in, warts and all.
100% human writtenChecked by Pangram