Earlier this fall, I sat down with Haylee Bolinger, who illustrated most of the stories in our anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, to discuss her work on Hieroglyph and other projects. You can learn more about Haylee, see examples of her work, and contact her at her website, https://hayleebolinger.com.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joey Eschrich, Project Hieroglyph: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Haylee Bolinger: I’m originally from a small town in Wyoming, and I earned my BFA at the University of Wyoming in 2010. I moved to Arizona to get my MFA in Sculpture from Arizona State University. That was quite an adjustment because before coming to ASU I had never lived in a town of more than 30,000 people, so that transition was…interesting. Now I live and work in Los Angeles.

JE: How do you think your upbringing in a small rural community has shaped your work?

HB: A lot of my work incorporates sexual themes, and I wonder if that’s related to being just oblivious to subcultures, sexual or otherwise, and then suddenly becoming aware of the incredible diversity of people, first through the Internet, and then again when I started grad school in Arizona. Wyoming can feel small, closed-off, even isolated sometimes – although I met a lot of really open-minded, cool people there, and I’m always thankful that my parents are supportive of who I am and what I’m doing.

JE: What are you hoping to accomplish when you address sexuality in your work? Are you trying to provoke a certain kind of response?

HB: When I’m working with controversial themes like sexuality, I’m trying to present them in a way that feels comfortable for everyone. I guess I’m trying to make the topic of sexuality a little bit more approachable for people from all backgrounds, and I think growing up in a conservative community in Wyoming is part of that.

One way of making sexuality more comfortable is to address it to an object or product that is desirable, or well-designed, then alter that object in a way that is a bit more overtly risqué or sexual.

JE: A number of your sculpture pieces involve taking consumer objects and morphing them in a way that brings out something in the way they look or feel that connects to sexual allure. Why do you think you’re drawn to that kind of approach?

HB: A lot of the objects I choose are knick-knacks that might have decorated people’s homes in the 1970s and 80s. Once upon a time they were incredibly desirable objects, but now you can find them at Goodwill or the Salvation Army. They lost their allure somewhere along the way.

I alter these objects in a way that’s kind of juicy and voluptuous, but often really silly too. And that’s because I remember seeing these exact objects and playing with them as a kid and thinking that they were funny things to have in your house. Like why do you need an ornate steel basket to hold hard candy – and now I think, why were those specific one’s clearly so popular? I like the concept that the object was once desirable, before I ever came along and did anything to it. I capitalize on these well-designed objects by making either drastic or minimal alterations, to give them a new alluring personality. It’s kind of like dressing up your grandma in too youthful clothing; it’s a little awkward and funny.

JE: Are there other themes or ideas that you return to again and again in your work?

“Peeping Don,” by Haylee Bolinger, for the “Momentum: Women Art Technology” exhibition

HB: I really like working with technology. To be honest, I’m not entirely tech-savvy, so usually I need a collaborator. But when I find that help and work with technology, it’s usually something that responds to the body. Recently I made a piece, “Peeping Don,” for the “Momentum: Women Art Technology” exhibit at the Night Gallery (in Tempe, AZ). The technology in that piece enables it to respond as if it’s alive, like it has a personality, but it really it only has one response and it only does it because of movement nearby. But it does give the impression that you had violated its space: if you get too close, it hides, like an animal – maybe a sea urchin. Something very simple can create the sense of a personality or a relationship with the viewer.

I’m getting more interested in pieces that actively provoke a response. You can’t always know how people are relating to the work intellectually or emotionally, but they do relate to the physicality of it. Maybe someone just walks by, no paying much attention to the artwork, but when it moves, it’s difficult to find a person that does not actively engage. “What is this thing? What’s it doing?” I actually had a few people scream. I don’t think it’s a scary piece, but they were just so surprised that they let out a little scream when it suddenly moved.

JE: I think as humans we’re always ready to give inanimate objects personality. Like you said, the piece only does one thing, but even so we want to imbue it with a selfhood.

HB: I think that’s very true, and it’s nothing new, even for things that don’t move. In my family, each person has a different chair that they always sit in. And there’s some identity built into that chair because that person sat in it all the time and maybe the left leg is a little shorter, I don’t know, something weird like that, or it has a special design that appeals to them, or expresses something about them.

I’m a lot younger than my siblings, so growing up I spent a lot of time by myself coming up with these alternate realities where each object in the room had its own life and did stuff when we weren’t around. I think people really love objects and so the idea that they have personalities of their own is really natural.

JE: Why did you get involved in Project Hieroglyph? What piqued your interest?

HB: I’m not a science fiction buff but I do read science fiction books and watch movies. And I didn’t know if I could do it. But I wanted to try. I bring my own crazy things to life in drawings and sculptures, and I wanted to see if I could rise to the challenge of doing it for someone else.

It was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I thought that I would read the stories, and the images would just be there. And I wanted to do things that were really original – I didn’t want to draw something that looked like the images that you expect to see in science fiction.

JE: What was your process in creating the illustrations for Hieroglyph?

HB: I would usually start by reading through a whole story in one sitting, and while I was reading I would make visual notes and sketches in the margins, write a few notes, and highlight some of the really descriptive lines. And some stories were harder than others because they were so visual, with so much information and so many good scenes to choose from.

David Brin’s “Transition Generation” is so visual that it could almost be a graphic novel. He is so descriptive and puts so many images in your head. In some of the other stories, the descriptions of the technology were a little less vivid.

JE: I know you spent a lot of time on illustrations for Neal Stephenson’s Tall Tower. And the sheer size, the verticality is such a challenge there. If you want to capture the enormity of it, you lose the opportunity to flesh out the details.

Illustration for Neal Stephenson’s “Atmosphaera Incognita,” by Haylee Bolinger

HB: You can’t mix the size and the detail in the same image, for sure. And I tried to zoom in, but once you’re zoomed in enough, you’re looking at such a small segment of the overall building. And even when I tried to stress how huge it is, I often had these moments where I said, “You know what? It’s still a lot bigger than it looks here.” I tried to draw a farm scene inside the tower in one of my sketches. It’s so huge, there has to be a farm in there somewhere, right? And finally I gave up on zooming in, and said, okay, I’m just going to draw it from outer space and really get the full impact. I really did get hung up there going through lots of different ideas.

One surprise was how often my spontaneous sketches ended up working much better than more ambitious color paintings. Things that were much less rehearsed ended up sticking.

JE: One thing I’ve noticed about your illustrations is how organic they look. This is really evident with the Tower – there’s a danger of it being very sterile and monumental, but the sensibility you bring to it is rounder, softer, almost messier. When we think of technology we often think angular, tight, efficient, but there is a gooeyness to many of your illustrations. Were you conscious of using that aesthetic?

HB: I felt guilty about that! After I had completed most of the drawings, I said, “Maybe I should go back and try some science fiction drawings.” So I went back and looked at them and I felt a little guilty because I just kind of went for it with my own style and I do like those gooey edges.

But I guess if it works and it makes sort of a distinctive impact, then good. I do like illustrations from other people working in science fiction that are very concrete and precise, but that doesn’t come naturally to me.

JE: What was your favorite story to illustrate?

HB: I really enjoyed Gregory Benford’s “The Man Who Sold the Stars.” There were so many options for illustrating that one, and I did get hung up on all of the choices for a while. I didn’t want it to look like the Star Trek version of space exploration. But those images are part of my visual memory bank, and it’s hard to think around them.

I loved the human drama of the story: that the main character was this guy that rose to the top from humble beginnings and then became rich, and maybe a little corrupt, and had to leave Earth, and ended up finding his way to another distant planet when he was 120 or something.

My reaction was, “Yes! I want to do that.” But then again, when he arrives at the new planet, there are all of these horrifying things everywhere. But he describes it as very beautiful. My reaction was, “How do you know that giant butterfly isn’t going to suck your eyeballs out?”

JE: They land in this giant, gross swamp but they seem to love it.

HB: I would be terrified. But they just laid down on lawn chairs or something and just said, “Okay, let’s hang out.” Maybe when you’re 120 it doesn’t matter, but….

I also really liked the relationship between the protagonist and his wife – she is so powerful and self-assured.

JE: It strikes me that you’re drawn in your work to things you find funny, where there is a sort of intentional or unintentional silliness, whether it’s a person or an object. So in Benford’s story, you have this guy lounging on a lawn chair deep in space at the end of his life, but he’s also this intense, intimidating venture capitalist baron. There’s something kind of silly there.

HB: I agree. With Benford, I didn’t put much thought into it at the time, but I can see that aspect of it, looking back now.

JE: It’s a serious story but it has these absurdist touches. There’s a resolute realism to the way that Benford writes, but also a bombastic quality to the story that verges on the absurd, in a charming way.

So what was the most challenging story? Was there one besides the Tall Tower that gave you a lot of trouble?

HB: I did a lot of research for Brenda Cooper’s “Elephant Angels,” mostly visual research into elephants – for example, I don’t see the back of an elephant that often. It was tough because I tried to do the illustrations in color and I ended up Photoshopping it into black and white and then working on the image digitally. In your mind’s eye, an elephant is grey, right? But they’re not. They’re a million different colors and to do the coloring properly would have drawn too much attention away from the drones.

Another one that was tricky is the drone camouflaged as a fly for Lee Konstantinou’s “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA.” He doesn’t describe the drones in detail so I had to make something up. I hope he didn’t imagine them as little quadcopters!

JE: That’s one of my favorite images. I love the fusion of the technological and the organic.

Illustration for for Lee Konstantinou’s “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA”

HB: I had a lot of fun with Lee’s story because of the Wyoming setting. The premise felt so true to me: rebels in Wyoming doing something weird and quietly subversive. The state has a whole rebel outsider history that most people don’t know about. And I was really familiar with the area where some scenes took place, so I tried to put some rock formations that I was familiar with in the background of the illustration with Appledrone’s RV.

JE: As you think about your own work and your aesthetic, what story or artwork has inspired you most?

HB: I recently read a biography of Andy Warhol and that was really fascinating and bizarre. Part of me was saying, “I want to be just like Andy Warhol,” and the other part saying, “I don’t want to be anything like Andy Warhol.”

While I was at the University of Wyoming, there was this amazing artist, Kaarina Kaikkonen, in residence at the university’s art museum, and she spent the whole summer making this massive sunrise out of coats [Editor’s note: The exhibition is titled “And It Was Empty,” and it was on display in 2007. You can learn a little more here.] She made it out of vintage coats that were going to be thrown away, and I don’t know why, but I was fascinated by it.

When she talked about a previous installation, “The Journey Home, 1995. Hanko Beach,” she told us a story about a boat accident that took place in her home country, Finland. The water was so cold that people were drowning others unintentionally, just to survive. And a few men did survive, but they were having trouble living with themselves because they had drowned people just to stay afloat in this icy water. A lot of her work deals with gender inequality and loss; I guess this piece stood out for me because she seemed conflicted about its meaning. Her work, and the way she talked about it, was a real insight into the layers of meaning that one artwork can embody.

And I think meeting her was part of it. Maybe if I just read about her work, I would have been less influenced by the magnitude of the installation, and the sincerity of her content. Since I met her and she shared an honest part of herself and her work, it’s become one of those things I won’t forget. I try to remember that when I’m somewhere showing my work and people want to talk with me and ask questions. If I talk to them, maybe the experience will mean more to them, and my work will become something that they will remember.

A few more images from Haylee Bolinger – you can see more of her work at her website.

Earlier this fall I sat down with Arizona State University’s Jathan Sadowski, a writer on technology and society and a researcher on the future of cities. This interview is the third in our series of deep dives with creative thinkers from a variety of different backgrounds. You can read the other entries here.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joey Eschrich, Project Hieroglyph: Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Jathan Sadowski: Currently I’m a Ph.D. student in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program at Arizona State University (ASU), which is part of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes. I’m also affiliated with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society and the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project at ASU. I have a master’s degree in applied ethics, also from ASU, and my undergraduate degree is from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I started off as a polymer chemistry major but after a couple years I shifted focus to political philosophy, sustainability, ethics, and the philosophy of technology.

My primary research interest is cities and urban systems, and my interest in that grew out of working with researchers from the Center for Nanotechnology in Society on a project called Futurescape City Tours, which is a participatory public engagement project about urban technology and the future of cities. That project revolved around taking participants on an urban walking tour of their city—it took place in a handful of cities around the country—as a way of deliberating about the role of sociotechnical systems in urban life, especially the “invisible” infrastructural technologies that are often taken for granted.

I’m currently working on my dissertation, which is about “Smart Cities” and how information and communication technologies are influencing and shaping new forms of urbanism.

JE: You also do a lot of writing for popular publications, right? Can you tell us more about that, and maybe about a couple of recent articles you’ve written?

JS: I do write for a number of different popular outlets, including Slate, Wired, The New Inquiry, and others. I do that because it’s a way to reach a broader and wider audience with ideas about politics, social justice, and technology—and I think there is always more room for people to be thinking in a serious way about those issues and trying to influence the public discourse. So over time I’ve started thinking of myself as less of a technology writer, and more of a political writer who cares about technology.

U.S. Army, Creative Commons: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

In July I had a piece in Al Jazeera America about the emerging political economy around biometrics. We’ve seen a rapid expansion and implementation of technologies like facial recognition and iris or fingerprint scanning—ways of identifying or verifying people’s identities through some sort of biological characteristic. This allows for the creation, storage, and sale of somatic, bodily data. All of a sudden people are able to be broken apart into hyper-specific streams of data, which can be valuable commodities to marketers and to governments. We’ve all heard about Big Data and the data economy, but maybe we need to start thinking about the face economy or the iris economy or the gait economy.

Also in July The Baffler published a piece I wrote about the myth of the “digital native.” I looked at the history and use of that term and the vast set of faulty or unfounded assumptions that are baked into it, as well as who is propagating it and profiting from it. It turns out that the main proponents of the concept of these “digital natives” are education technology consultants and gurus and proprietors. Their narrative is that all of a sudden you have this whole new generation of students who are much more comfortable and productive when they’re plugged in online than when they’re sitting in a classroom, and how are these un-savvy “digital immigrant” teachers ever going to educate the next generation if they’re stuck in the old analog world? The problem, though, is that the moral panic these profiteers stoke mostly benefits them, and not the students and teachers.

JE: In addition to all of this great work for the popular press, you’re writing a dissertation on “Smart Cities.” What is a Smart City?

JS: It’s funny—every time someone finds out that I’m working on Smart Cities, inevitably their first question is “What is a Smart City?” And I don’t really have a neat, pat answer, because a major thrust of my research is looking at the narratives and discourses around Smart Cities. There isn’t a dictionary definition, and this is a very contested field right now with a lot of actors, from government agencies and policy analysts to technology reporters and corporations. Just like with the “digital native,” there is a lot of power behind the definition of a buzzword like “Smart City,” and the definition that wins out will do a lot to shape the future of actual cities.

An important underlying commonality in the definitions floating around now is that Smart Cities merge information and communication technologies—things like sensors, mobile computing, surveillance and data gathering apparatuses—with urban environments. Of course, how these technologies will be used, and to what end, is another question entirely, and a hotly contested one.

JE: What kinds of Smart Cities exist today? Is there a shining example?

Anti-Smart City graffiti in Rio de Janeiro, by Paul Keller, Creative Commons: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

JS: Existing Smart Cities today take a number of forms. The first is the retrofitted Smart City, where initiatives are implemented in existing cities, layered on top of existing infrastructure, to make the cities “smarter” in one way or another. In Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, they’ve built this big central control center that is constantly monitoring the city through surveillance arrays and sensors tracking things like traffic patterns, crime, energy use, and so forth. This is a very security-oriented version of the Smart City, but the endpoint is that the city is networked and connected in such a way that it can be monitored as one big industrial system. Importantly, a lot of the hardware and software is built by U.S. technology corporations. In the case of Rio, IBM was the main actor who developed most of the underlying technology.

A second type of retrofitted Smart City is oriented primarily towards efficiency—cutting costs, being more sustainable, cutting down on things like utility costs and transit times. New York City has implemented a number of initiatives that, rather than securitizing the city, are aimed at making all of the different flows of the city run more smoothly: traffic, infrastructure, water, utilities. This involves using data analytics, collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data about the city. Just like with Rio, the narrative is that the city is an urban system, a technical or industrial gestalt. The goal is to quantify the chaos of urban life in order to make tweaks that reduce and control it, to create a cleaner and more efficient system.

Then you have top-down Smart Cities that are built from nothing. The most well known example of this is Songdo in

Songdo, South Korea, by Dongho Kim, Creative Commons: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

South Korea, although it is yet to be “brought online.” The idea here is that instead of layering information and communication technologies on top of existing urban infrastructure, the technology is built in as a fundamental feature of all aspects of the city’s design and development. I would argue that Songdo is as much Cisco Systems’ city as it is South Korea’s, because they have most of the contracts for the hardware and software that power it.

In this built-from-nothing model, you’re looking at an urban environment where every single aspect is monitored and controlled in very specific and granular ways.

The key thing to think about in terms of implications is where to draw boundaries about how information is collected, how it is used, and who has access to it. Of course it’s helpful to have a sensor on the side of a building that is able to detect how weather is affecting that building’s durability and structural integrity. But if that sensor is then connected to a massive, seamless web of other sensors and all of that is being closely and actively monitored and tweaked and scrutinized, that’s a different story entirely. There’s a gestalt in that the whole of all of the sensors in a city is much greater than the sum of its parts.

JE: No one sensor by itself is “the problem,” or presents a particular threat, but if you take the whole system as a unit, it becomes more eerie.

JS: Right.

JE: So it’s easy to see why this idea of the Smart City is attractive to citizens and governments: more efficiency, more security. What are we not thinking about or talking about enough? Where are the blind spots in our image of the Smart City?

JS: I don’t think enough people are thinking seriously about how the boundaries between these urban technologies and the people and bodies within them are starting to blur. Part of what I’m working on in my own research is trying to think about this connection among the city, the human body, and technology in a different way, specifically using Donna Haraway’s ideas about the cyborg as a lens.

We have to think about interfaces—points of connection between people and our cities. You don’t really live in a city; it’s not a passive relationship. You live with the city and you live through the city. Being in a specific city fundamentally changes who you are, the way you think, and how you can live your life. Cities have very fundamental effects on us, when we interact with them and they simultaneously interact with us.

The boundaries are not as discrete as we think. We tend to think, “well, there’s technology over there, there’s the city all around me, and then there’s me, complete in myself.” But in reality those boundaries are blurred—and these sensors and surveillance technologies just make those connections, those interpenetrations more obvious.

So the term I’m using to think through this is “cyborg urbanization”—a term that comes from some of the newer literature in urban studies and political ecology—which pays careful attention to these boundaries, these frontiers or points of contact, and tries to incorporate an understanding of relationships and interfaces into the way we design cities and the technologies that we build into them. The key outcome is to design cities that amplify and emanate the values we have as people: human agency and autonomy, the right to move through the city freely, the ability to flourish.

JE: How can we think hopefully about the future of cities, using these ideas you’ve been developing? What is an image of the future of cities that are designed with attention to the values you just talked about?

JS: It’s not enough just to think about these interfaces and boundaries critically; we also need normative and ethical principles. I think that a hopeful vision of a future city would have to attend to what urban studies scholars call “the right to the city,” which is a normative principle, or even a tagline or slogan that says that city dwellers should have a right to make choices and control the cities they live in. This sounds straightforward but it’s quite radical when you apply it to every aspect of a city. The right to the city concept means that people would have a say in every aspect of what is called the “urban metabolism”—all of the things that flow in and out of a city, including commerce, capital, labor, energy, water, people, knowledge, institutions.

The geographer David Harvey, in a punchy way, gets at the essence of “the right to the city,” what it entails, and why it’s important:

The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

I believe that information and communication technologies have a big part to play in this future. When I write about Smart Cities I’m often suspicious of the way that the technology is used to control and monetize people and communities, but it’s not that these technologies are inherently good or bad. It’s a question of politics: who has authority and power over the technology, how is it used and interpreted, and why. Are sensors being used to create a city where the residents are easier to monitor and control, or where their information is being turned into a revenue stream for corporations or other entities? Or are they being used in a more democratic way where people are able to access the data on their own and use it to enrich their lives?

JE: Is the recent movement for governments to make more data public and open a promising development for you?

JS: Simply making data open and available doesn’t go far enough. You can have open access data or open source technologies at the city level, but that will have little or no effect if people aren’t able to understand it and use it. Data needs to be designed in a way that makes it easy for citizens to actually use it and then in a meaningful way influence how the data is used and policy is derived from it. It’s not enough just to have open access as a principle; it needs to have actionable results for the people that governments are supposed to be there to serve.

JE: Right. Information literacy and accessibility need to be factored in, or else you just have massive reams of data that is inscrutable to most people.

JS: That’s right, but it’s not just a question of literacy, because that puts the onus on the individual city dweller to increase their literacy and seek out additional education and training. We used to have this idea of governance and government where the public sector was there to, first and foremost, actually help and aid the public as a whole—rather than to create and maintain markets and profitable business environments for the private sector. Governments should have the obligation to not just throw open the vault to data, but actually design it and make it available in ways that are actually helpful to people. The onus is on the people in power to make that data accessible, not for us to adjust to the way they have it formatted and packaged.

Too often the people benefiting from open government data are big technology corporations, which now have access to huge free troves of data that can be used and manipulated in any number of ways. But that’s the thing—it often takes the infrastructure and abilities of a large corporation to actually make use of this information.

JE: What story has inspired you most in thinking through these issues about Smart Cities and the future of cities?

JS: Ghost in the Shell is a mid-1990s anime science fiction movie that really engages with questions of the cyborg, and also depicts the future of the city in really interesting ways. The film features a cyborg city where people not only have a technological body but are actually able to interface with and reconfigure the urban environment.

I’ve read some quotes from one of the lead designers and animators, and he talks about the exact ideas we’ve been discussing—the boundaries and interfaces among people, technologies, and cities. He uses the metaphor of a spider and its web: we create this huge system that is interconnected and networked and encompasses everything, but the human isn’t the spider that constructs and controls and oversees the web. Instead, each of us is just a thread in the web: we can become engulfed by the systems we create.

Ghost in the Shell’s city is very much along the lines of what I’ve started calling “Frankenstein’s Metropolis”: a situation where the things we create rise up and start to control us, fight back against us, and encompass us within their complexity. And so the master doesn’t always remain the master. The creator doesn’t remain the creator.

Editor’s Note: The Hieroglyph anthology features two visions of the future of cities: Madeline Ashby’s “By the Time We Get To Arizona” and Annalee Newitz’s “Two Scenarios for the Future of Solar Energy.”

Sam Arbesman is a complex systems scientist and writer with a PhD in computational biology from Cornell University and a BA in computer science and biology from Brandeis University. Sam’s most recent book, The Half-Life of Facts (Current/Penguin, 2012), explores how different fields of knowledge—medicine, physics, technology—change over time. Sam argues that knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and that any given field’s change in knowledge can be measured like the half-life of a radioactive element. We can measure when facts will be rendered obsolete, the rate at which new facts are created, and even how facts spread. This measurable evolution of truth, fact, and reality can have a powerful impact on our lives.

You can learn more about Sam at his website, https://www.arbesman.net, follow him on Twitter at @arbesman, or read his blog, Social Dimension, at Wired.com.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joey Eschrich, Project Hieroglyph: Could you tell us a little about yourself and what you’re working on right now?

Sam Arbesman: I’m currently Senior Scholar at the Kauffman Foundation based in Kansas City, as well as an Associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. I’m currently thinking about the models we build in science, as well as the systems we build in technology. Specifically, I’m considering the central role that the tension between elegance and complexity has played in our thinking about science, technology, and the world around us.

So on one hand, especially in science, we want single equations to explain the world. We want elegant solutions: the Pythagorean theorem, or E=mc². We frequently want the same thing in our technology—think about the attractive simplicity of the original iPod. But often, I think, the world doesn’t adhere to our desires, so we need to create fairly complicated models or systems that are glitchy and that kind of work and kind of get the job done, but are not particularly clean or simple.

In some cases, not only are these systems more complicated than we might have wanted; they’re so complicated that even the experts don’t fully understand how they work anymore. A question I’ve been asking about this is: Should we be concerned about this seeming escalation of complexity? Should we say, “This is how it’s always been and this is not a problem?” Or should we be trying some sort of middle path between simplicity and complexity?

When we think about all the things that we won’t understand, or computers making discoveries that make no sense to us, or creating systems that we don’t understand anymore, we think that maybe these things are very far at the margins of experience, or maybe not even going to be happening for decades or even centuries. But it turns out they’re already happening and they’re happening more often than we might have realized. Especially within science, with the advent of Big Data, we have very powerful means of deriving meaning from data or saying, “All right, we can create a model that has predictive value.” But whether or not we fully understand how that model works is a completely separate question.

JE: Can you give us an example of a situation where even experts were confused about an important development in their own field?

SA: In the years leading up to Y2K there were some experts in information technology and computing who were saying that we were heading towards disaster, and others were people saying, “Oh, don’t worry about it.” And it turned out (and I think actually partly because of lot people actively worked to fix it) it wasn’t actually a big problem. But it was interesting to see leading up to that point, there were many people, even experts, who genuinely weren’t sure what was going to happen.

TCAS cockpit display

Another example of this is a system called TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system). It’s what airplanes use to make sure they don’t crash into each other in the middle of the air. It turns out that there are only a handful of people who really understand how this system works. And it’s not because it’s legacy code or some antiquated system, it’s because it’s so enormously complicated and there are a lot of conditional statements—Under this condition, this thing has to happen, unless this has already happened—and it’s such a weird system that often the experts who work with it on a daily basis are surprised by its behavior when they’re simulating it.

And so we’re beginning to see that we find elegance where we want to, but behind that there is a massive amount of complication and complexity that we don’t fully understand.

JE: That reminds me a little bit of this article I recently read about Netflix, about their recommendation algorithms. Their engineers are often surprised about the types of recommendations that come up and we, as consumers, are frequently surprised as well. But they don’t really know exactly how the algorithm works sometimes—it can act in ways that seem kind of capricious.

SA: Absolutely. I think we’re seeing this more and more and I’m trying to figure out how we should respond to that. And this has actually led me in some fun directions. I’ve been talking to philosophers of science and also historians as well, because a lot of things we’re thinking about aren’t particularly new questions—they’re just heightened because of the increasing power of our computers and our machines.

Maimonides, author of The Guide for the Perplexed

While I’m oversimplifying a great deal, with the advent of the Scientific Revolution, there was this idea that if we put our minds to it, everything was amenable to our querying of nature. That we could completely understand the universe. In the Middle Ages, with more of a focus on the infinite, there was a sense that there were only so many things that you could ask questions about and actually get answers. So in the 12th century the philosopher and physician Maimonides, in his book The Guide for the Perplexed, gives a nice little list of things we could know for sure, including the number of stars in the sky and whether that number is even or odd. Or the number of planets or the number of types of animals, things like that. And in fact if you look within science and we actually now know the number of stars visible to the naked eye, although not necessarily the total number of stars. We know that number and it’s around 9,000 and the number is, of course, even.

And in a way, we’ve had this kind of triumphalist attitude when it comes to science. But now we’re beginning to say, “Well, maybe there are actually some limits to the systems we can understand.” We should recognize that sometimes when we hit our limits that’s okay. It doesn’t have to make us worried.

JE: Do you think some of this growing complexity has to do with the massively collaborative nature of some of these enterprises and the ways that they’re institutionalized—instead of this historical model of a unitary great thinker who comprehends everything?

SA: I definitely think so, and it varies from system to system. But I think one of the reasons we see increasing complexity is because it’s a lot easier to add to something and to modify something than to take the entire thing and then re-examine it. You can actually see in the nature of law and regulation, which is one of these systems I think about as a technological system, although we don’t traditionally think of it that way. And it is a system that we ourselves have built. But it’s a lot easier to add new laws or new regulations rather than to scrap everything entirely. Now it’s even easier—we have these widely distributed digital systems through which you can collaborate very easily.

When people add things they often interact with the things that are already there in ways that we might not have anticipated: and in the old situations, laws have unintended consequences, or these really massive technological systems are buggy in ways that we don’t fully understand.

As science grows and grows, no single person can read all those scientific papers, or even the new papers within their own specialty. So you have a situation where there’s probably a lot of discoveries that can be made simply by connecting one paper to another. This dates back in the 1980s, when computer searching was in its infancy, when the information scientist Don Swanson said, “Imagine there’s a paper connecting concept A with concept B, and another paper that connects concept B with concept C. If you connect them all together, maybe concept A implies concept C.” But the literature is so large that no one would actually be able to connect these two things on their own. And we now actually have computer programs that can kind of step in and help build those links.

As we specialize, people still have expertise in certain areas, but it becomes more and more difficult to see the connections among a variety of fields.

JE: So you’re working, talking, and collaborating with these philosophers and historians and trying to see what perspectives they can add to your work on elegance and complexity in science. That’s very much what Project Hieroglyph is all about: finding the unexpected connections between different fields and figuring out how they might come together in a bigger picture, a bigger story.

How did those people—who don’t consider themselves “scientists” in a literal way—help you think more rigorously about science?

A: I learned that the topics that I’m thinking about and the questions I’m asking have been taken up by many people in many different ways. I’ve also been given lots and lots of interesting examples to think about.

As an example, there’s this Yiddish term naches, which is used when you have a certain vicarious pride and joy in the accomplishments of your kids. So you have naches or shep naches, when your kid gets married or they have their bar mitzvah or graduation. So even if we can’t understand the discoveries computers are making, that’s okay, because they’re our creations and so we can actually maybe have naches for our machines. And I think I wrote something about this and then someone on Twitter said, “Oh, actually there’s this great science fiction short story that discusses the same kind of thing.” They don’t use that Yiddish term, but it was just great to see that oftentimes when you interact more broadly with people from all different areas, you get to see how other people have approached these same ideas.

Having talked with a number of historians and philosophers, I have a much better sense of how these trends have ebbed and flowed over time. And it’s been remarkable.

JE: Do we need to tell better stories about complexity? Do we need narratives that make messiness and complexity seem as beautiful and enriching as simplicity and elegance?

SA: Some of this is just about expectations and mindset. If we constantly yearn for elegance, don’t find it and are disappointed, that’s bad, because we’re often not going to find it. But if we say, “the world can be simple and elegant and that’s really cool—but the world can also be really complicated and that’s great too,” then I think that’s even better.

Storytelling can be a powerful vehicle for inspiring people about both elegance and complexity. You can have a story that unifies everything and helps us think about the world as an elegant gestalt. But some of the best-loved stories revel in the exception or the weird situation—they’re not always tied up in a neat bow.

JE: One of Project Hieroglyph’s fundamental precepts is that we had a more optimistic, maybe even utopian discourse about science, technology and the future in the 1950s and 60s, and now we’re not telling those optimistic stories anymore. Does this ring true for you?

SA: Well, I think it’s more a question of what gets the publicity. It’s a lot easier to be successful when you’re pessimistic because that’s what gets the headlines. And it’s the same reason when you watch the evening news, it’s not going to be feel-good story after feel-good story. It’s going to be that something has gone bad because people’s attention is naturally drawn to disruption and danger. In fiction, and in television, people have to some extent moved toward these grittier stories that depict the seedy underbelly of the world.

But at the same time, we still see a lot of very optimistic stories. People are still publishing space operas. It isn’t only dystopian near futures in our fiction, although the darker stuff is perhaps more popular.

People have become a bit more embarrassed about enjoying optimistic stories, and maybe that’s the thing we need push back against. We might need a more unabashed willingness to say, “Yeah, the world is an awesome place, and it can get better.”

JE: What story has inspired you most? Or most profoundly shaped the way you think about the world?

SA: I’ll say the entire world building exercise of Star Trek, rather than just one of the series. When Next Generation came out, I was at a very tender age, kindergarten or first grade, so I watched those with my family. I’m certain I didn’t get out nearly as much as I could have at that age. But they inspired me to think about the world in a completely different way.

I remember watching one episode that focused on something about DNA and genetics. When I first saw the episode, I didn’t know anything about genetics. And I remember having a very long conversation with my father afterwards about how DNA works and RNA and proteins and enzymes. It was incredibly eye-opening and then I think that inspired me to get more involved in biology. And my PhD is in computational biology, so that was obviously a critical moment for me.

By Devlin Thompson, used under a Creative Commons license.

And so, at the risk of coming across as a hopeless fanboy, I think the Star Trek franchise ultimately provides a venue for discussing really interesting ideas about technology, but also a lot of important social and cultural ideas as well. And from a firmly optimistic perspective.

I think that’s really what good science fiction can do. Science fiction isn’t just an excuse to talk about transporters or spaceships. I mean, sometimes it is, because those things are cool. But it’s ultimately a great genre of ideas and I think many episodes of Star Trek embody that potential in its purest form.

JE: I love that answer because when I go and visit classes of high school kids and middle school kids to talk about Project Hieroglyph and our work with science fiction, I always talk about it as an ideal meeting place for ideas, because everybody feels like an expert about it, in one way or another. Everyone feels like they know enough to take part in the conversation. Whether you’re a person who loves to read, or an encyclopedic Star Trek fan, or whether you’re a rocket scientist, or an industrial designer, everybody has a claim to some sort of expertise, and Star Trek is a great example of that, because it’s an incredibly inclusive cultural touchstone.

One last question for you: one of our challenges with Project Hieroglyph is to try to tell optimistic and inspiring stories about the future. As someone who is deeply engaged with science and technology, how do you think we can tell optimistic and inspiring stories about the future that are still thoughtful and critical?

A: Well I’m very optimistic by nature—some people have told me that I’m too optimistic. I’m willing to wear that as a badge of pride. I feel that in general, you can look at every trend with an optimistic lens or a pessimistic lens. We’re constantly at the frontier of the unknown and there are always many things we don’t know. But science is always in a draft form, and the potential to be able to revise our understanding and incorporate new discoveries is really powerful and amazing.

For me, to be optimistic we don’t need to always strive for elegance and closure. We can revel in a universe of wonderful details that don’t necessarily add up to anything perfectly coherent, but are interesting in and of themselves.

In the face of this massively increasing technological and social complexity of our world, in the face of people’s fear of information overload, we need to realize that these are not bad things. Irreducible complexity isn’t bad. We can find an incredible diversity of cool phenomena in our world and respond by saying, “Wow, the world is overwhelmingly beautiful.” It can be overwhelming, but that complexity is also amazing, and we have the opportunity to constantly explore further and deeper and learn more about it.