Homo ex Machina

This past week or two I've been on an organization binge—or a frustrated binge, probably, because I'm not satisfied so far. Basically, it's organizing my silicon-based brain—my mail client (and getting rid of email addresses I don't use, or at least planning to), my address book (which I almost never use), my document files, my harddrive in general, my web browser bookmarks (just got Safari 4 and it's much faster than Firefox), and my iTunes Library (huge task).

It comes partially with this whole Proteus Creative thing I'm working on. In an effort to create an entirely new system for my professional life, working on a workflow, and designing a portfolio interface, it seems like everything now needs to be sorted and categorized. Which is funny—five years ago, I would have tested as a Perceiver on the Myers Briggs (a personality assessment). Now I would be classified as a very high Judger. For the non-Myers Briggs inclined, this is basically a transition from a loose, flexible organizational style to a tight, list and category oriented style. By far, I've swung the later direction, especially over the course of the last two years. Being at Arcosanti and prioritizing my work life to such an extent, out of necessity and not just personality, has only enforced this swing. I've learned a lot here—writing project proposals and plans, figuring out group workflow in an online setting where everyone already has busy schedules; delineating phases for a given project, even the notion of deliverables (something that, on the scale of a client and freelancer relationship, just seems silly) seem now like something useful, daresay necessary. From task planning applications to automated timers and alarms, from project outlining programs to RSS feeds that can keep you passively up-to-date on the latest open source developments and "Web 2.0" script widgets—everything needs to be synthesized, digested, and organized in such a way that it is easy, quick, intuitive, and causes as little stress on my person as possible with the maximum amount of payoff.

Overkill? Maybe. But also, perhaps, necessary. For some people, it's not so far fetched. And if I want to become truly "professional" in the graphic design world, and take on big clients that work in this sort of fast-paced environment and have that amount of organization not out of romance, but out of necessity—well, I might as well match them at their own game, if not exceed them.

There is a bit of romance to it—the romance of mechanization and automization. But on thinking about this, I realized my standard for the amount of organization I want in my life: everything should be structured to a point that it could practically run itself. Of course it won't—the intent is needed to push the button or move the mouse. The intuition of my design eye, which cannot be boiled down to anything other than what it simply is—intuition—needs to be there for anything worthwhile to come out of Photoshop. After that though, File > Save As, convert to JPG, run a script that uploads it to the web which triggers an alert to my client, etc., etc. It's all there, and the computer takes care of the rest. The entire process is automated—except for that one, tiny spark that makes the giant, anodized aluminum, pre-scripted machine run. Intuition—the intent that it should, and must, work.

I'm well aware of the fact that I spend most of my day in front of a screen, and I'm well aware of the fact that I, aside from having my laptop welded into my flesh, might as well be a cyborg. As I've written before, my iTunes Library and harddrive should be a fairly accurate mindmap of my actual brain. And I think that, as technology and the Internet progresses (computing in the cloud, Google makes an operating system, guess where that's going to go, etc.) the phenomenon is only going to sharpen and intensify.

But there will always be that one thing missing to make the giant communication web in the sky run, should humanity cease to exist.

I think that the Star Trek Borg image of a future, technocratic humanity is no longer an accurate depiction of our evolutionary future. We'll imbed implants in our brain, let machines help run our organs. But we won't let them control our will. We won't submit ourselves to the cloud-brain. We're too emotional, too individualistic, and too democratic for it. Our machines will grow ever more complex, more and more complex than even we as organisms could be. The silicon in our iPods will hold more information that our carbon-based brains could ever hope to. But there will be no instigation, without us, do use that information. We may create a machine race, someday, with its own intent, maybe. But we'll never submit ourselves to the way a machine thinks. We're too inconsistent and lie too much to ourselves to ever engage, effectively, that kind of evolution.

Then again, we're also probably some of the most adaptable creatures on the planet. So I might be wrong.

But at least for now, I think the real future of humankind is not that it will be amalgamated with technology, in the sense that we become the technology. The technology may become us in the far future, but for now, the machine may be a hulking mass, indisputably efficient and effective.

But without the intent in that circle of screens, there will always be that one missing element to make the whole thing run. The intent—the intuition between scripts, will not be there. The one thing that will not be able to be quantified, or scripted. The pure chance that something, somewhere, actually tells the system, to "go." We will literally become the spirits within the machine—the ghosts of flesh in an overwhelming sea of invisible information and rigid file directories. The machine will control everything—except for the one thing it can never understand.