We did it, gang: we reached the future. We're here! Now what?
We have the flying cars and the holodecks and the sex robots and the gene splicers and the wearable tech. We have private space exploration and miniature computers; cars that drive themselves and computers you unlock with a fingerprint and thermostats you can have a conversation with. The future is now, baby, like right now, today, in your house. From the middle of the 19th century, to the utopian visions of the 1930s, straight through to 1980s cyberpunk, we've been waiting for the early-mid-21st century to arrive. But us, our generation? We have seen the future, and it's a toaster that will text you when your breakfast is ready.
And, of course, it's artificial intelligence. A benevolent HAL, right at our fingertips! Huge neural networks of computing power, combined with the most data humanity has ever collected—mug shots, movie scripts, recipes, medical breakthroughs, internet searches, pornographic Tumblr posts, blog posts, program code, all of it—swirled together in an artificial brain and spitting out images and words that feel human. Sometimes more human than us idiots could manage.
I'll admit it: I've been into it. I've admired the Marvel-by-way-of-Wes Anderson posts. I've clicked on the knitting grannies creating eldritch sweater vests. I've read through the knitting patterns, trying to picture the finished garment in my mind. A romp with AI can be fun, like thinking about what aliens would give each other for Christmas. A romp with AI can also be useful, especially if you're a cheating university student.
But I suspect that when AI starts drawing from our immense datasets, what comes out looks like innovation but is more like a remix. What AI gives us, and what so many human designers and so-called innovators are giving us, are retreads and smudged facsimiles.
I was not surprised when the 1990s resurfaced in fashion, because all trends come back and our consumer nostalgia cycles have been getting shorter and shorter; on the other hand, the 1990s heavily referenced the 1970s, and aside from grunge, the slip dress and the expansion of athleisure to outside of the gym, we did not do a ton of sartorial innovation. (The decade after, the 2000s, saw hipsters referencing moments from the 1930s barbershop all the way to 1980s New Wave; I am super looking forward to my kid dressing the way I did in university, which is to say, like a member of Blondie!)
I just unsubscribed to Bon Appetit, in no small part because their recent redesign explicitly references the "approachable" cookbooks of the 1960s, a time that I most associate with aspics and red-sauce Eye-talian food. (Also, the $70 annual price tag was just not going to fly in this economy.) While BA actually casts its culinary net very wide, especially in its post-Adam Rapoport era, the "new" look of the magazine makes it feel like "upscale suburban mid-century American striver," a vibe that kind of got us into a lot of our current mess in the first place. We're now approaching a moment where the reference loop starts to become
an ourobouros, when there are no new looks to look back on. Do trends disappear entirely? I mean, they've already started to. But when everything is a reference to the past, how do we ever crane our necks towards the future?
I sense that humanity is encountering a critical failure of the imagination that goes beyond culinary magazines and chatty AIs. For so long, we've been envisioning a beautiful, shiny future—sleek and chromed and so easy. And then we get here, and it's climate change and wealth inequality and people locked inside factories during tornadoes. It's not easy. It's hot, expensive, and full of gross diseases. (On the other hand, we do have photocopiers that work most of the time.) It's so easy to look backwards, to a time when we felt safer, when the future was still a little ways down the road.
Even our loftiest goals—like Elon Musk's aim to get to Mars!—are echoes of dreams that were presented to us as children. Hanna-Barbera premiered The Jetsons in the middle of the international space race, a pissing contest that has been taken up, two generations later, by the world's wealthiest men. Am I supposed to believe that everything that will be invented is here now? Or that every aesthetic has been developed? The idea of a bike short would have slain a peasant dead; I live in an era when Rose McGowan wore a backless dress to the MVAs. (I hope someone recreates that look for the youths!)
What the AI spits out is comforting because it plays with what we know. Every human creator starts from what they know: their memories, their experiences, their past. The future is scary now: the planet is going to roast our descendants, which is truly unsettling. We have invented the technology we need to circumvent this, but the oldest roadblock—human ego—is holding us back. I don't know what comes after the flying car: when I look up "what will the future look like?," I feel like I've been seeing those pictures all my life.
And maybe this isn't the end of the world. As a species, we've learned so much about the world in the last century, from the tiniest bits of the universe to its outermost edges. Maybe those images of the future have been propulsive to our imaginations, allowing us to see what we would build once our technology catches up to our sense of possibility. Maybe we're just tired, after all that.
But then again: when is the last time you saw something new? Something that made you shake your head in wonder, to clear the cobwebs out, to expand the world as you know it? Not a catchy remix or a self-referential nod, not a computer's idea of what we might want, or a designer's projection of his past self into current day, but something truly, beautifully new?
