Bowie on the Internet… and AI?

History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. There’s this amazingly prescient exchange between David Bowie and Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight in 1999:

Paxman: But what is it specifically about the internet? I mean anybody can say anything, and it all adds up to what? It seems to me that there’s nothing cohesive about [the internet], in the way that there was something cohesive about the youth revolution in music.

Bowie: Oh, absolutely. Because I think that up until at least the mid-1970s, we were still living under—in the guise of—a single, absolute, created society, where there were known truths and known lies, and there wasn’t a sense of duplicity or pluralism in what we believed.

That started to break down rapidly in the ’70s. The idea of duality in the way we live—that there are two, three, four, five sides to every question—started to emerge. The “singularity” disappeared. And that produced a medium such as the internet, which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.

Paxman: You don’t think some of the claims made about [the internet] are hugely exaggerated? I mean, when the telephone was invented, people made amazing claims too. 

Bowie: I know! The US President, at the time it was invented, was outrageous. He said he foresaw the day in the future when every town in America would have a telephone!

No, you see: I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society – both good and bad – is unimaginable.

I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.

Paxman: It’s just a tool though isn’t it?

Bowie: No! It’s not, no… No, it’s an alien life form…

Is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here.

Paxman: [The Internet is] simply a different delivery system though. You’re arguing that it’s something more profound?

Bowie: Oh yeah, I’m talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico – it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about. It’s happening in every form. It’s happening in visual art, the breakthroughs in the early part of the century with people like Duchamp who were so prescient in what they were doing and putting down. The idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation. What the piece of art is about is the “gray space” in the middle. That gray space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.

Watch it here, and consider how AI is not “just a tool”, but how it will shape us as humans.