Image: RB + MJ

Before the version of AI we have today, there was something called GOFAI.  It stands for good old-fashioned Artificial Intelligence.

 

It didn’t work. And led to one of the famous AI winters where people were convinced that thinking machines were an intractable problem.

 

GOFAI used a top-down approach.

 

The idea was to take all we know and program it into computers. One piece of information at a time.  It was incredibly time consuming, but most critically, it was incomplete.

 

You could program a computer for what we already know. But what about what we didn’t know? What about special cases and eventualities? What about stuff that never occurred to us or might happen tomorrow?

 

Life is complex and ever-changing. GOFAI couldn’t hang with life.

 

The top-down approach became a dead end. AI was on the ropes.

 

This changed mid-way through the second decade of the 21st century.

 

In 2016, with the invention of neural networks and the deep learning process, the modern age of AI was born. 

 

The new approach was revolutionary and has many similarities to Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution.

 

Modern AI functions from the bottom up. Creating an almost biological outpouring of ideas and possibilities along the way.

 

What today’s AI is revealing is that top-down creation and management possibly isn’t what it is cracked up to be.

 

As Daniel Dennett points out in “From Bacteria to Back and Back” what we call R&D works best from the bottom up:

 

“Evolution by natural selection is not top-down R&D, like computer programming, in spite of its invention and heavy use of modules. It’s bottom up, Darwin’s strange inversion.”

 

Anyone who has used Midjourney or ChatGPT has seen great ideas appear from the deep. As much as we could call a prompt top-down management, it is more of a request to be served something surprising from the bottom.

 

Thanks to generative AI, the best and most fit ideas bubble up to the surface. Sometimes it seems genius.

 

To understand how to succeed in today’s new world, we must take a bottom-up approach. We must look at the world from an entirely different perspectives and invert our thought processes.

 

What Daniel Dennett means by “Darwin’s strange inversion” is that intelligence starts at the bottom and works its way to the top.

 

For anyone that been alive since the industrial revolutions, it’s hard concept for us to wrap our heads around.

 

Traditional business has been built on the premise that intelligence lives at the top and the job of management is to drive it downwards.

 

This is what top-down management is all about.

 

But what people are missing is that AI isn’t logical, it’s biological. The generative process starts at the bottom and goes through a black box we will never truly understand. By nature, it only works when given a free hand.

 

Right now, generative AI is creating new possibilities as you read this. It is not waiting for instructions from central command.

 

This bottom-up idea of the world destroys GOFAB (Good old-fashioned business). GOFAB is the increasingly antiquated top down, non-iterative, non-trusting, non-collaborative systems we have been implementing for over a century.

 

Things are changing. Fast.

 

For managers in the old top-down world this can provide some hairy questions:

 

1. How do I let go of micro-management?

 

2. How do I check my professional egocentricity?

 

3. How do I understand and build systems for the inverted world?

 

4. How do I most effectively recognize and curate great ideas that bubble up from the bottom?

 

Deep down we all want control — especially those in charge.

 

The good news for managers is that control is not going away.

 

But how it is defined and implemented is rapidly changing.

 

Control used to mean setting objectives, doling out tasks and checking on progress.

 

Today control means building and trusting in new systems, recognizing good ideas, and green lighting promising ones with utmost speed.

 

The new way calls for less process and more doing. AI compresses time and removes repetitive tasks. But at the same time demands more human genius.

 

In the time that humans can construct a single prototype AI generate have ten. The human genius is in selecting the right option.

 

It is no longer about micromanaging the details but, instead, macro-managing the new biological, bottom-up way of invention and creation.

 

In truth, it is nothing new, we just need to shake off the clunky heuristics of a system that was invented to harness the power of the steam engine.

 

The future lies in revisiting a system that has been around over 3.7 billion years..

 

Welcome to Nextness. More than a newsletter, a mindset.

The video essay “Why Do Films Feel So Different Now” is exactly what it says it is.

 

It’s an explanation why modernist films such as Top Gun 2 look so out of place in a world of post-modernist films.

 

When we look back at the first Top Gun, for instance, they had a certain approach. A modernist approach. Modernist movies don’t break the fourth wall, they are not self-referential, and they have endings that come with old-fashioned trapping such as resolutions. They follow the classic hero’s journey.

 

Post-modernists movies were a reaction to all this predictability. Underneath it all, post-modernists thought modernism was masking the way things really are. The Eisenhower America we saw in film before the mid-60s.

Post-modernism can seem a little depressing. But it has also been the opportunity for a lot of laughs. Indiana Jones was one of the first blockbusters to play with post-modernist constructs. Even when in danger of being buries alive Indy loved breaking the fourth wall.

 

Ratcheting things up a bit, we arrive at Quentin Tarantino.

 

It has been said Tarantino is “the great recycler.” This is also a post-modern mainstay. Acknowledging how we are formed by the culture is a way of inventing a new post-modern culture.

 

It was great while it lasted.

Now post-modernism is showing signs of decay. What we learn in “Why Films Are So Different Now” is that post-modernism is becoming meta-modernism.

 

Today’s moviemakers are conflicted says,Thomas Flight, the video essay's creator:

 

“But in the midst of this self-reflection, movies still want to be movies. They are just deconstructing the value of art of film but are caught in conflict with themselves. Containing deconstructive self-criticism and sentimentality together.”

 

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” has all the signatures of a post-modernist movie, but it contains one flaw that belies its philosophy. It has heart. At the end, the lead characters have a moment of acknowledgement. There is resolution. Even modernist tears.

 

Today’s filmmaker is trapped between the need to serve two ideologies. One if of the irreverent post-modernist director with full credentials, and second is that of the commercial modernist who wants to fill theaters.

 

For the director, it’s a difficult dance without looking like a sell-out. They must provide just right amount of sentiment and modern structure. It’s a fine balance. Toss in too much modernist narrative and Jeff Dember, of whatismetamodern.com says, “Viewers will think you’re cheesy or corny.”

 

The irony is that post-modernist or meta-modernist film may die at its own hand.

 Just like the atomic age put an elephant in the room that shaded all the elements of our existence, AI is now that elephant. It is everywhere, and it requires us to forge a new worldview.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every time I work on a creative assignment, especially pitches, I think of Johannes Kepler.

 

Not for his creativity and work ethic, those are well known, but his ability to smash orthodoxy.

 

Kepler existed in a post-Copernican world. The heliocentric world was something everyone accepted. Particularly when they were a safe distance from the Church.

 

But what didn’t make sense was predictions about the movements of the planets even in a sun-centered solar system were not that much better than in the old Ptolemaic or geo-centric universe.

 

What was up?

Thinkers at this time had a lot to think about beyond science. Going against the grain could lead to getting locked up by the Church. Or worse, Kepler’s own mother barely escaped being burned at the stake.

 

And here was the rub – ideas that were 14 centuries old. In the estimation of the ancient Greeks, the planets adhered to geometric harmony, the most harmonic shape being a circle. They imagined the orbits of the planets nested within each other in spheres like Chinese boxes.

 

Where the spheres rubbed together you got the music of the universe. It was too darn beautiful, let alone dangerous, to wish to see it any other way.

 

The pull of tradition was exceedingly great. This is where creative assignments come in. When briefed on a new campaign we are generally told we have a clean slate. The client wants new thinking, so nothing is sacred. For the time being.

 

But the pull of the past is profound, and it cannot be ignored in developing new work.

 

Suddenly our first principles thinking comes with caveats. 

I once worked for an agency that pitched and won the business of a healthy Mexican food restaurant chain. The brand was energetic and youthful. After winning the business the client informed the agency he thought John Madden would be the perfect spokesperson.

 

To jettison Madden required pulling a serious Kepler.

 

Kepler was able to see past the Platonic orthodoxy and the romantic stories about the music of the spheres. What he saw was something different.

 

He saw the ellipse.

 

But not immediately.

Kepler spent years creating a tortured model of the planets that attempted to include all the stuff the client, in this case the Church and the traditionalists, wanted to see. It was awkward, forced and probably should have stayed in the bag.

 

Pitching for new business is difficult.

 

It is a high stakes game that near midnight sometimes draws out people’s conventional thinking. To reduce risk. I’ve won pitches and I’ve lost pitches. But I have never won anything by doing the expected.

 

Dispossessed of what he thought other people wanted, Kepler did what he thought was right. Because of this we know the planets move in elliptical motions and we still live by Kepler’s Laws.

 

Beyond his intellect and hard work, Kepler ultimately may have succeeded because he didn’t give a fuck.

 

Unlike his sponsor, Tycho Brahe, he wasn’t from money nor did his family have noble beginnings. Even in his home he was something of an outcast. His wife called one of history’s greatest astronomers “simple of mind and fat of body.” Fortunately, not everyone shared this opinion.

 

Kant said he was “the most acute thinker ever born.”

 

On the eve of the Second Industrial Revolution, and with the Theory of Evolution just a few years old, a curious letter to the editor arrived at the Press in Christchurch, New Zealand.

 

It was a letter than wasn’t about the local politics are how certain people in the community were failing in their job, it was squarely focused on AI.

 

Although the term was never mentioned, that wouldn’t come for another 100 years, “Darwin Among the Machines” predicted today the philosophical debates we are having 160 years after the letter was penned.

 

What the letters author imagined was a state where machines begin to evolve even faster than we have. Sort of picking up where we left off 200,000 years ago and following are path faster and more intelligently.

 

Cellarius, as the author called himself, was concerned with humans becoming secondary to machines. He imagined a new profession of the machine doctor, the person who tunes and repairs our new overloads when they need a quick fix. What sort of bedside manner this new profession would require he doesn’t mention.

 

Cellarius called the new species “mechanical life” assuming a new kingdom among the order of the living creatures:

 

“What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth likely to be? We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organization; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race.”

 

Sometimes chilling new themes are best served as satire.

 

In the same spirit Swift posited eating children to fight poverty, Cellarius calls for the destruction of the machines before it’s too late.

 

“The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person or a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them.”

 

Cellarius was later revealed to be Samuel Butler, an acquaintance of Darwin and the writer of a Swiftian novel whose name now adorns a buzzy LA supermarket chain – “Erewhon”

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AI changes everything. Including storytelling. Nextness Volume 9 is brought to you by Storymachine. As a leader in the AI video space, Storymachine scripts, films and delivers everything from branded content and commercials to corporate masterclasses and training films. If you are looking to unleash a new kind of storytelling, Storymachine just might be your jam.  storymachinefilms.com