Imagining Differently
How AI Is Opening a New Age of Imagination
Over the past seven years, I have published two books—Speculations on Postcapitalism and What Is Postcapitalism?—that make the case for a disruptive transition from the world as we have known it to a new and different world built on different principles and new ways of meeting economic needs. The underlying cause is the digitalization of everything, I argued, including robotics, AI, 3D printing, and much more. Yet the argument as been largely economic in its scope. Until now. In this essay, I will lay out a bigger picture of the transformations in society as it has come to me and my colleague Jason Jones. These ideas will also point a direction for prospering in the new world as it unfolds before our eyes. Hang on. It’s a wild ride.
The Changing Logic of Modern Life
Over the least 150 years, modern life has transitioned rapidly along with the technology that drives it. Before that time, change was slow and plodding; today it is rapid. The last really major change before this was the emergence of capitalism, which started in the sixteenth century as it slowly replaced the feudal and mercantile systems of the previous many centuries. We had feudalism for perhaps a thousand years, then capitalism for five hundred years, which was toned by the rise of industrialism in 1750. In America, the change has subsequently moved in the last 150 years or so with a startling rapidity, taking us through two major ages and now into a third.
The Industrial Age
The Industrial Age came into being on the back of the well established philosophical view of the mechanistic universe. The French philosopher Rene Descartes is credited with bringing this view of the world into being in the sixteenth century. As a dominant metaphor, the idea of the mechanism or machine helped humanity to see in new ways and organize life according to those new insights. The power of those insights really took hold with the advent of industrialization and this gave rise to the Industrial Age. While it is tempting to think of this age in primarily economic terms, the reality is that it shaped the entire culture and experience of humanity.
For example, on a personal level, value in this age generally accrued to people who were efficient, obedient, and capable of consistent, high quality, repetitive work. The glorious task of the human being was to, well, complete the task! Skills training and compliance within a system were well rewarded, and one could find one’s power through belonging. You could belong if you were normal and conformist.
More than that, value also accrued to people who could see the world through this lens. Darwin looked through it and found the mechanism of evolution. Freud found the mechanism of the human psyche in early experiences. Pasteur found the mechanism of disease in bacteria and germs. Science itself was based on this insight. All the great discoveries occurred by looking for and expecting a mechanism to be present. That’s what I mean by a lens. It focuses us on a certain perception of reality.
The mechanistic view, by the way, appears to be the vision to which our current American leadership aspires. Back to the good old days of manufacturing jobs, coal mines, oil wells, and pollution. They were good old days because in their time, they were aligned and profitable. What is missed in this view is that we are no longer in the Industrial Age when the values needed to prosper were industrial values based on a mechanistic view of the world. While there are remnants of this thinking in some of these industries, even they are automating their way into a new future. This is why those days are unlikely to re-emerge, despite the initiatives focused on bringing it back. Society has moved into a different age, and superior insights or value can no longer be delivered through the mechanistic view.
The Information Age
Computers were invented in the 1950s and 1960s, but they didn’t start to make a dramatic shift until they were popularized as the personal computer in the 1980s. The ubiquity of the PC initiated the digital revolution and the dawn of the Information Age in which information became the core source of value rather than the repetitive processes of mechanical industrialization. Just as industrialization diffused into the culture and changed things, so has the information age.
In the information age, value is found in access, speed, and analysis, largely because those are the things that a) make information actionable, and b) turn it into knowledge. The esteemed human role in this age has been to handle data and manage systems. The education of the past—skilled training and such—fell by the wayside in favor of technical fluency and individual achievement. The key was to learn how to think. One could gain power and wealth by knowing more and knowing it faster, rather than complying with a mechanistic process.
Whereas the industrial age was guided by the metaphor of the machine as a way to understand the world, the information age became more complex. At first, machines became systems as the dominant metaphor, and then the metaphor shifted again toward networks. These metaphors functioned as lenses with which to see the world. When you look at nature, for example, and see not an ecosystem but rather a web of interconnectedness—i.e., a network—new insights emerge as to the essence of what nature is. This view has just been emerging in the last twenty years or so, and already it is being replaced yet again.
The Age of Imagination
This brings us to the current moment in history which is the emergence of the Age of Imagination. Here, value emerges from vision and observation. It arrives in deep nuance and synthesis of many things. Speaking is important, but so is listening. Interpretation takes people further than compliance or knowledge. Rather than repetitive task-doers or data handlers, people in this era are meaning makers, initiators, and observers. We create and receive. Success is produced by following curiosity and developing interdisciplinary awareness by making connections, but also by surrender to what is and the openness of acceptance. These practices educate the imagination in ways that enable it to prosper. Power comes to those with clarity of insight and alignment with what is emerging into reality. Power is the ability to articulate vision with nuance, specificity, and clarity—then to refine it through reflection and observation.
If network was the metaphor for the information age, AI may be the metaphor for the emerging Age of Imagination. I say “may be” because it seems likely that the metaphorical lens for understanding reality in different ways associated with imagination may only be partially visible right now. Nonetheless, we can play with this notion. How could it be that AI is a metaphor or lens?
AI as the Metaphor
If you think of how AI works, it needs two things—intention and a prompt. If you have an intention and give it a prompt, AI goes and does the work bringing together new ideas and new perspectives. It kind of just does its thing until it presents what it has manifested. When you read it, it may not be exactly what you were looking for, but then you prompt it again, this time for a revision. It adds things you didn’t count on and creates ideas you never thought of, but it is responding to the imagination of the person prompting it.
Spiritual teachers of all kinds suggest that this is exactly how manifestation happens in the universe or in relation to higher power or God. As the manifester, you find and clarify your intention, send a prompt into the universe (perhaps as a version of prayer), and stand back to wait for the universe or God to respond. This practice is less of a pleading with God for something you want—the way many prayers are put into the world—than it is being present to the world as it is, holding intention, and issuing a prompt. Then, the universe does its thing and delivers what it delivers. Imagination is then renewed with revised prompts to let it bring what is closer to the original intention.
The thing about this manifestation process is that when the prompter is confused, the universe doesn’t respond. When the prompter is egotistical, the universe often shies away. Real strength comes in finding the balance between surrender to the action in the universe and the agency of the Self, which is, in and of itself, a product of imagination.
The point is that just as a “user” holds an intention, puts a prompt into AI, and waits for whatever comes, so a user holds an intention and puts a prompt into the universe to manifest reality. This suggests the possibility of AI being the idea or lens through which we can expand our understanding of the world. It helps us to see aspects of the world we could not previously see without a deep spiritual awareness. Here, the metaphor of AI shines a light on how we manifest through imagination—a reality we would be blind to if we could only see through the lens of a machine or a network. What else will we see differently if we view it through the lens of the AI metaphor?
Again, let’s go to the natural world. If we drop the lens of the machine, ecosystems disappear. One lens to replace it, as we discussed before, would be the network and all the relationships that are connected—something different from a machine. But what if we drop that lens as well and consider AI as a lens? We would see intention and prompt. What is a prompt? A seed. It prompts the earth to begin the process of life—all the processes of life—and we can imagine into it separately. As my friend Jonathan Stensland once wrote: “A plant is a seed that decided to stand up and take a look around.” From a human perspective, the planting of the seed is the statement of intention, watering is a prompt. Yet both the water and the seed are alive, and both can be imagined to have their own intention. How might this change our understanding of what is going on in a garden where humans and nature interact? How can the gardener revise the prompt? Can there be other expressions of intention? What possibilities emerge as we see creatures large and small through such a lens? But this is only the very rudimentary beginning of how this lens will shift our perception or reality. Networks may helps us see connections, but AI leads us to seeing how one thing prompts another in relationships heretofore invisible to our perception.
The Age of Imagination Is Just Beginning
Whether it be nature or manifestation in the universe, we are only just beginning to see how this new metaphor will change our understanding of the world. Both the age of industry and the age of information changed everything throughout society. They engendered new modes of education, methods of raising children, and business models. They changed our perception of the cosmos, our experience of spirit, and the way we understand the microbiology of Earth. We came to understand psychology and sociology in new and innovative ways. Everything in religion, economics, politics, and art were affected. Nothing in human experience was left unchanged by seeing the world in a new way. We are only at the very beginning, but the same thing is about to happen again.
The carriers of this new imagination will be the young people—late millennials and Gen Z—whose lives are soaking in the changes being wrought by AI. Already, traditional entry-level white collar jobs are getting harder and harder to find because they are being handled by AI. As new factories are being built, ostensibly to produce blue collar jobs, robots are replacing the workers. What this means is that these industrial age and information age jobs are disappearing, and new young workers must find a way to bend AI to their needs.
Here’s an example. For the last forty years or so, one of the best jobs you could get was as a coder. That’s an information age job. Without code, the computers that process information cannot operate. There were always good jobs for coders. Now, however, coding is being taken over by AI. Software and app designers are increasingly able to simply tell AI what they want a program to do, and AI automatically writes the code. As I saw in one article, code that would traditionally take six months to write can now be produced in about a day and a half.
From an industrial and information age perspective, this can only be characterized as the utter destruction of jobs and opportunity. On the other hand, the young millennials and Gen Z-ers who build a relationship with AI will now use it to unleash their imaginations. Suddenly, there is no barrier to creating an app if you have the imagination to do so. Hence, coders become agents of imagination. They begin to get creative. All kinds of new apps and products will be produced in ways we cannot even imagine.
Likewise, there is a big scramble in business coming. What does AI mean for sales people and rainmakers, for example? Does it enable everyone to operate a small solopreneur business? Traditional industrial jobs will disappear, but what opens up? How will such people navigate in a world where so much expertise is so close at hand? Indeed, how will we even measure an exchange of value? Can you see how profoundly things can change?
These are simple examples. The capabilities will get more and more profound with bigger and bigger impacts on society. No one could anticipate the impact of Descartes’ mechanistic universe, and no one can anticipate how our world will change through this new lens either. Imagination has the greatest potential to empower the future and to empower the people who understand it and use it. Imagination points to a force that is in the world, and it is up to us to use intention to prompt it.
Anthony Signorelli
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I’ve never thought of the movement of humanity into an Age of Imagination. Fascinating. And somehow darkly beautiful. Great writing, thanks.