 being interrogated, but which inherently must be interrogated and which interrogates you in the process. There’s an increasing amount of interest in trying to design possible futures. This practice of speculative design has especially been taken up by consultancies that work with companies, helping businesses position themselves for the near future. In effect, these designers are mercenary visual futurists. What is interesting with Mental Work is that we are putting forth a fiction in the form of a factory that everyone can engage in out of their own interest. It is a total fiction in which all aspects are put together, visually and narratively, to create a seamless internal experience for the audience. What is even more unusual is that this is not happening at the stage of a technology that is about to be available through Amazon, but rather something that is still in the lab. The process of reflection that would ordinarily take place when a speculative designer has been hired by a company is to develop some near-term way in which to make a product more appealing or even more functional. Here we are looking at a much more distant future. We’re exposing the earliest technological instantiations of the science, and even the science itself, to speculative design, and, in so doing, trying to find the best possible way forward.
José People use the term “speculative design”, but let me use another term, “disruptive design”, in the sense of confronting people with the limits of technology. If people come out of this experiment thinking that the technology is already there and that everything works fine, we have failed. We need to make people understand that they have choices around this technology. The word “responsibility” is very central for me. The human must be at the centre of the equation, which doesn’t mean that you need to be constantly aware and conscious of every single thing that is going on. We are not conscious of every single process in our bodies – thank God – because we would be drunk on the weight of information. Our body has evolved to shield us from many low-level processes, but we can take back control if we want. The important thing is that we always have the reins and that’s key to the vision of the Cognitive Revolution.
Jonathon Where we have the ability to project possible futures, we need to act on that knowledge. That is part of human evolution and to not act would be to abdicate something essential in a way that could be highly detrimental to us and even more detrimental to those who come after us. The Cognitive Revolution can be different from the Industrial Revolution by fostering a collective self-discovery of who and what we will and want to become. Entering Mental Work is a way to become more informed as a citizen and more prepared. You position yourself individually and collectively in relation to that future, without feeling that it is inevitable – because it isn’t. Brain-computer interfaces can be tools for reflection because of the feedback loops that are inherent in this kind of mental and physical interaction, but given the plasticity of the brain and the way in which the algorithms involved can adapt, they can also potentially result in change over evolutionary time. That is to say, these interfaces can be a means by which we affect how we evolve as a species.