New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

Carbon dioxide clouds the mind: it directly degrades our ability to think clearly, and we are walling it into our places of education and pumping it into the atmosphere. The crisis of global warming is a crisis of the mind, a crisis of thought, a crisis in our ability to think another way to be. Soon, we shall not be able to think at all.

exploration. As the experiments progressed, the researchers realised that the benefits of combining human and machine intelligence worked both ways: the researchers became better at intuiting improvements from complex results, while the machine pushed them to explore a greater range of possible inputs, negating the human tendency to avoid the remote edges of a possibility space. Ultimately, the Optometrist approach of random sampling combined with human interpretation may be applicable to a wide range of problems across science that require the understanding and optimisation of complex systems.

Admitting to the indescribable is one facet of a new dark age: an admission that the human mind has limits to what it can conceptualise.

machine. Both Amazon and Uber wield technological obscurity as a weapon. Behind a few pixels on Amazon’s homepage are hidden the labour of thousands of exploited workers: every time the buy button is pressed, electronic signals direct a real human to set off in motion, to perform their efficient duty. The app is a remote control device for other people, but one whose real-world effects are almost impossible to see.

The machines are learning to keep their secrets.