Margaret Heffernan on the relationship between human agency and creativity on the one hand and machinery and technology on the other:
“I once worked with a CEO who, in a meeting, realized he was having a heart attack only when his Apple watch told him so. Just data points in a cloud, we are in danger of fulfilling Max Frisch’s definition of technology: the art of arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it.
“The effortless life. What a prospect, what a strange and pointless reward. I’m reminded of two things: Robert Graves’s recognition that ‘a perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.’ His point being that the striving for the perfect poem is the point. That it is an unachievable ambition that makes the work glorious and what makes it worthwhile. More recently, I felt the bereavement of mathematicians whose greatest problems had just been solved by AI. The perfect answer was never the point. The effort, the understanding, is the point, the true reward.”
What’s the antidote? “How,” she asks, “do we defy this fate?” The answer is in creativity and in art, the most human of pursuits, and in rejecting the economists’ worldview of measurement, conditioning, and passive standardisation.
Her belief that we should be “ready not to submit but to act” reminds me of an idea in sense-making that I’ve written about before: that, when a situation is complex, analysis is useless and there’s no such thing as efficiency. You can only learn by taking action.
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