AI is a technology rapidly diffusing through culture as a medium of experience. 

Like all major shifts in our media environments in the past, this will introduce a new set of metaphors for talking about ourselves and our perceptions of reality.    

This note briefly looks at (1) prior mediums and their metaphors for change, and (2) our current anxiety over “alien” and “other” as a striking similarity to the fifties when the zeitgeist of flying saucers materialized against the backdrop of atomic weapons and the Cold War.

History may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.

The Mechanical and Industrial Age: Extending Our Body

Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism that the “medium is the message” is as vital today in the age of AI as it was in the past.

It was McLuhan’s contention that every invention of humankind is an extension of a physical or mental faculty. Our tools, however, are not passive things. Their use doubles back and creates a social and psychological environment that alters our sensory balance and perceptions.

The first major extension of human capabilities occurred with the invention of tools and machines that augmented our physical strength, intelligence, and mobility. From the wheel to the steam engine, from the printing press to the telegraph, from the airplane to the rocket, we have created devices that have enabled us to travel faster, farther and higher than ever before. We have also been able to produce more goods and services, communicate more widely and efficiently, and explore more domains of nature and culture.

These extensions have had profound effects on our society and our environment. They facilitated trade, commerce, industry, urbanization, globalization and colonization. They also generated social conflicts, economic inequalities, environmental degradation and cultural homogenization.

The Electric Media Age: Extending Our Nervous System and Brain

The second major extension of human capabilities occurred with the invention of electric media technologies that augmented our sensory perception and cognitive processing. From the radio to the television, from the telephone to the internet, from the computer to the smartphone, we have created devices that have enabled us to transmit and receive information across time and space instantaneously. We have also been able to store, process, analyze and synthesize vast amounts of data, creating new forms of knowledge and intelligence.

These extensions have had profound effects on our culture and our consciousness. They have created new modes of expression, interaction, education and entertainment. They have also generated new forms of awareness, understanding, creativity and innovation. They have expanded our horizons, enriched our experiences and diversified our perspectives. 

But like a brain without a mind, they are primordial forces that can also produce contradiction, confusion, and fear.

The Medium of AI: Close Encounter with the Collective Unconscious

Neal Postman gave us an extremely fitting lens for regarding AI as a medium rather than a technology:

Technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it is given a place in a particular social setting as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts.

AI is a rapidly spreading social creation that is visible in ways that preceding mediums were not. Our conception of it and our relation to it is currently undefined. Its shape is also unclear, with experts disagreeing about its dimensions. Much the same can be said about the archetypes of our collective unconscious under the stress of disruptive change and the backdrop of a fluid world order. Aliens and UAPs are projections of archetypes and metaphors for this time of uncertainty in the medium of AI.

The parallels to 1957 are remarkable and instructive. 

Go Fast(er)

In the mid-20th century, the world was grappling with the rapid development of new technologies which had profound implications for our understanding of the universe and our place within it. It was also a period marked by political tensions, social upheaval, and existential anxiety caused by the Cold War.

And like today, the rumor of flying saucers swept the country as sightings multiplied and conviction in their reality grew.

In the public psyche, the lack of a causal explanation between world events and saucers was less important than the distinct feeling that the events were somehow meaningfully related. They were a synchronicity in the parlance of Carl Jung which he discussed in his thin 1957 volume: “A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.”

For Jung, it was the rumor of UFOs that was significant. Not their reality. They had risen from the collective unconscious as a living myth to compensate for the stresses of reality. They were described as technological because that was the metaphor for the era. 

In previous times they were experienced as celestial beings in the medium of religion or visions of a mass community hallucination. 

The archetype of roundness common throughout represented unity, which the fractured psyche was seeking to make sense of it times. 

Jung’s exploration of the saucer phenomena of the forties and fifties highlights a fascinating intersection between technology, psychology, and the collective unconscious. 

While the physical existence of UAPs remains a matter of debate to this day, their cultural significance as symbols of confrontation with the unknown and the mysterious in times of stress cannot be denied. 

In the present day, AI has ushered in a new era of uncertainty and possibility. As we continue to extend our mental faculties into the digital realm, we are once again confronted with the unknown and the mysterious.

Concluding Thought

Yeats’ “The Second Coming” serves as a potent expression of the turbulence and uncertainty that arises when the conscious and unconscious minds struggle to integrate.

The poem’s apocalyptic imagery and the emergence of the “rough beast” can be seen as a metaphor for the potential chaos and upheaval that may result from our inability to fully comprehend and embrace the profound changes ushered in by the medium of AI.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

***

Scott Broock is the Founder of Totem Networks, LLC, which provides strategic counsel and angel investments focused on generative AI. He formerly served as the EVP of Digital Strategy and Innovation at Illumination Entertainment and the Global VR Evangelist for YouTube.