Acts of Succession
My cousin encourages me. "The more stuff you remove, the more the house becomes yours." With each trip to Wisconsin, I discard more of my deceased father's belongings. Purging expired condiments, half-used office supplies, and spent gardening supplies, I am more motivated by reducing clutter than claiming ownership. Sometimes progress is more about eliminating than acquiring. I have added technology, sensors and controls that allow me to monitor and control the place from afar. Out with the old, in with the new? On the drive there, I listen to Hard Fork, a podcast about AI, which has become part of Foresight's toolkit and is a influence, I've realized, worth understanding and monitoring. Its development is so iterative and, some say, inevitable, as one version is replaced by another every few months. My Foresight business partner and I are in a different place than we were a year ago. Each client project has taken us another step forward toward some still-amorphous, emerging sense of "success" that is constituted by multiple factors, only some of which we can control. The future can only ever be discerned by living, not contemplating it, although we've done plenty of that! "My house," the descriptor still leaves me a bit uncomfortable, like a shirt from my father's wardrobe that quite doesn’t fit yet. I didn't choose it but, handed to me, am coming to accept it despite knowing that doing so, in a way, requires losing, or at least redistributing him. Like the adoption of every new technology, AI will invoke loss. All the attention is on its powerful abilities only obscures acknowledging what will be jettison as we embrace progress, make it our own, uneasily taking the previous generation's leftovers to the thrift store and dump.
