Machine learning is restricted to recreating the past. The AI algorithms, extracting and classifying the most intimate data of human life, create their models based on patterns from the past. This implies the impossibility of discovering anything truly novel, an idea which has not yet been thought and preserved.
Algorithms tend to recreate the pre-existing classifications, dichotomies, biases, and gender stereotypes. We would clearly notice the regressive-conservative character of seemingly progressive technologies if we realise that algorithm-reproduced social categories have been for many years questioned and deconstructed in various contexts. Recklessly implemented automatization may forfeit these previous critical efforts. For the time being, generalisations and reproduction of old social divisions and power structures tend to prevail.
In such a situation, it is of the utmost importance to refer to creativity and human agency. It is a human who can explain the causative relations of phenomena and establish a plan for moving through succeeding stages towards the realisation of the future we truly desire. It is the human imagination that is capable of creating images or visions previously unimaginable; it is the human thought that may develop previously unthinkable ideas. To do so, we need to step out of the frames created by companies, discourse, and practices of Silicon Valley and ceaselessly work on broadening our imagination, expanding it, and questioning the obvious – in order to create a sphere for potentiality, new practices, and ideas; to leave the valley of our imagination, examine and test what seems improbable, unreachable, alternative, incompatible with the existing paradigm, and what allows to think of a better world, beyond darkness, beyond the apocalyptical, doom-laden valley. In this new world, without a doubt, technologies would shape the majority of political, existential, social, ecological, and economic phenomena. The way we organise it depends on us.