Does trans-disciplinarity mean that each of us will need to study for at least 4 separate degrees? - One for learning our craft of choice; another to learn communication and digital media skills, a third for business studies and entrepreneurship and a fourth for computer science with programming practice at its core? Possibly it does but that would suggest at least a £200,000 personal investment at current prices. Realistically and instead of basing future learning on the legacy of medieval guilds, level-5 and 6 educations may need to adopt a more collegiate approach such as kind applied at ‘The London Interdisciplinary School’ in Whitechapel (https://www.londoninterdisciplinaryschool.org/). You see, I think machines designed for a single use-case will be the specialists of tomorrow. They will perform at speeds with fidelity impossible for a human. So what this means is advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning will likely set the “ceiling” for the quantity of forensic wranglers industry will be willing to pay for, and decide the value and therefore the price of a Ph.D by the end of the 2020’s in exactly the same way that capital and plant decided the value and price of labour at the start of the 1820’s.
‘Digital’ has been great at championing itself and has made its self easy to notice. So let’s focus on the type of ‘dish’ we may want to make because this aspect is generally given far less attention. It takes decades for humans to diffuse the benefits of a new technology throughout its social, economic and political ecology and it’s considerably harder to imagine and implement the hundreds, if not thousands of small complimentary innovations at the level necessary for humans to make changes to factories, offices and society. Quirkyposture’s ambition is for 10% of the world’s population (837.5 million) to know how to “programme” by 2099. Now, you’ll be forgiven for thinking why such a low estimate? Roughly speaking it’s taken our species about 10,000 years for 86.3% of us on average to be able to read and write to other biological machine the same as ourselves and, at the time of writing this blog entry, 60 years has passed for 0.4% of us to acquire the skill to read and write to non-biological machines, which of course we commonly call computers. No doubt that by 2099 there will still be people who cannot read and write sadly but the rest of us won’t stop learning to communicate in new ways by then, it’s just that Qurkyposture is all about people developing 21st not necessarily 22nd Century skills.
Complementary to Neri Oxman and her team’s work, is the Herculean effort made by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, ‘Darwin Tree of Life’ Project. Since 2019 they and 9 other institutions across the UK have been active in sequencing the genome of 2,000 species, with plans announced in 2022 to further sequence the genome for an estimated 70,000 species including plants, animals and fungi, found in Britain and Ireland by 2030: (https://innovationstories.sanger.ac.uk/completing-the-puzzle-of-life-on-earth). This visionary initiative will be Britain’s contribution to the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) which is the global effort to sequence the genomes of all species on our planet. New Growth Theory divides analysis into two distinct categories: ‘instructions’ and ‘materials’. Instructions represent “ideas” and materials become “things”. Materials can be thought of as goods with mass, like pots and pans, or mediums, such as when in a form like electricity for instance. Genetics store information to both instructions and material states in a single substance, which potentially makes it an incredibly efficient fabricant that we are only at the beginning of exploring. As legacy industries, have looked to reduce cost by setting up in developing economies, post industrial nations are tasked with finding new product and services derived from new economic analysis. Proponents of ‘New Growth Theory’ argue that the transformation from a traditional Industrial to a post-industrial Information age implies a seismic change to the rules of business which I will repeatedly emphasise in this blog as essentially neurological.
Performative media are "make happen" agents and contain aspects that resemble what smartphone apps generally do, but the subject of my book will be an exploration of the “applification” in mediums pertaining to physical things in the main. Forensic stories are “make aware” content and what they do is reveal the relationships between different mediums that conspire to build a performative media.
