*More James Bridle than James Bridle, hmmm, that's saying something.
(...)
Those days might be over - an abyss has opened and it is staring back at the design community. Crucially, this abyss presents us not with the problem of knowledge, but of design. If this gap is the one between production and interpretation, then it can not simply be closed through expert knowledge, as even the experts do not, and cannot fully know. Our formal systems have finally taken off in flight, revealing their deep alien nature, their non-binding relation with the real and their capacity to usher in a new real. If a central theme of any design method lies in constructing the metaphor between the model and narrative, machine learning techniques present us with one authored by non-human agents. We should be very interested in the new possibilities of constructing metaphors that structure and describe relations between formal systems and their effects—in order to understand what kind of attitude is appropriate after the classical one has been played out. The fear is that the attitude of “not knowing” will become the standard trope of the coming machine-learning culture, bringing us back into the domain of pure exegesis and interpretation, thus ushering in a new Dark Ages where the divine is replaced by AI.
For now, we can at least map out formal properties and conceptual implications of these phenomena. It is a beginning of an attempt to confront the situation through design. Some properties to note: an enormously large search space of non-abstract (but rather characteristic, recognizable, qualitative) elements, inherent replaceability and interchangeability of features, naming practices that depend on the strange art of keyword/hashtag association, tendency toward recognizable tropes. Interestingly, these practices mirror some well-known methods within contemporary design - collecting, sampling and mashing – but with a crucial difference: they are, strictly speaking, non-compositional, non-visual, and dependent on tags and keywords, rather than formal ideas....
