#12: Stories From AI-Free Futures
#12: Stories From AI-Free Futures
Some info on my new album/audiobook, and storytelling as critical practice.
I’ve been working on a collection of speculative near-future fiction about a world after, without, or beyond A.I. It’s an audio work, halfway between an audiobook and an album, titled Newly Forgotten Technologies: Stories From AI-Free Futures, and it’s released today on Bandcamp.
Here’s the description from the album page:
“In this current era of AI hype and hyperbole, we are often told that AI will play a major part in all our futures, and will completely reshape work and our daily lives. This situation seems to primarily benefit tech companies and their investors, while its impact on jobs, communities, and the environment is increasingly destructive. This future is presented to us as if it’s inevitable, and the only way for our societies to progress.
But what would a future without AI look like? What would happen if we ban, overturn, resist, or simply ignore AI?
Newly Forgotten Technologies: Stories From AI-Free Futures is a soundtracked collection of speculative near-future fiction about how we move past the current exploitative age of AI, and the reasons why we might want (or need) to do this.
Across eight short stories, plausible near-futures without A.I. are presented; in some it is banned, in others it is forgotten, phased-out, surpassed or surpressed. Some stories focus on large-scale cultural changes, and some on smaller communities and events. Some of these are futures we might want, some are futures we should work to avoid. None of them describe a future with sentient computers or self-aware machines.
Each story is narrated by a different ‘A.I. voice assistant’, e.g. Alexa, Siri, and the Google assistant, all of which can be heard to fail at being believably human in different ways. The stories are soundtracked by a score composed only from these voices, in which they have been dissected, distorted, and recomposed into new forms that highlight the machinic and dis-human nature of synthetic voices.”
(Front cover of Newly Forgotten Technologies: Stories From AI-Free Futures)
I wanted to make this work in this format for a couple of reasons: for one, storytelling is the greatest communication technology we have ever invented. Stories can survive the collapse of empires, the erosion of time, and the death of languages. Ursula LeGuin, whose birthday was yesterday, has my favourite quote on the value of storytelling: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words”.
Spoken stories are the most resilient, can evolve and iterate the quickest, and can travel the furthest. Using the synthetic voice to tell these stories (and dissect them to compose the soundtrack) gives me the opportunity to foreground its jarring dis-humanity as part of the work, one more reminder of the gap between the promise of AI and the banality of its reality.
The subject matter of the stories is a critical response to the emptiness and narrowness of the promised future of AI. Each story presents an achievable, believable alternative to the limited futures that are framed by technocapitalists through the lens of AI, which always demands increasing investment of time, money, and resources to get there. These are dominant and destructive narratives, often positioned as the only way forward for humanity. In future-facing contexts like this, I think that good work should always make the future feel open and full of potential that can be influenced by our collective efforts (or collective outrage).
Readers to this Substack will not be surprised to find that all the stories engage with humans and their complexities, including anger, hope, frustration, and anxiety, and some touch on themes I’ve discussed here. Of course, no generative AI tools were used in the creation of this work. I hope you enjoy it.
