We are still very early in the historical trajectory of planetary-scale computation. How its algorithmic species will evolve and how our cultural systems will train them and be trained by them is anyone ’ s guess. Writing from inside the research university, I hope that we will look back on this moment — when you could go to medical school and not take basic data structures or JAVA, or get a computer science degree and not be fluent in any of the basic issues in the philosophy of technology or the essential ideas of contemporary art, or train in a design program without working on any substantive political science problems — as one curtailed by bizarre intellectual paranoia. Our shared design project will require both different relationships to machines (carbon-based machines and otherwise) and a more promiscuous figurative imagination. Toward that, this book is my drawing on our cave wall, one that invites response, revision, and even replacement.
November 2014
La Jolla, California
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Preface