Reaching the enchanted forest

Like a vein of color running through the rock, our myth and fiction carry traces of an ancient idea: the primordial enchanted forest.

Close your eyes and you can almost feel it: a dense, living environment that is fundamentally alive, aware, and responsive to human beings. It breathes life into our fairy tales, our creation myths, our literary fiction, and the imaginary games we play as children.

This concept hearkens back to a time where the natural world held more mystery—and when there was simply much more of it. It is the echo of a world where the rhythms of lives and society were set by the interplay of living things. This is the world that inspired the roots of our spirituality, in animism: a belief in the living essence of all things.

Our world is truly alive, and interconnected to a depth beyond human comprehension. There was a period in history when we fit seamlessly into nature’s flows of energy, and we were fundamentally aware of that fact.

But at a psychological level, that period has ended. We’re now surrounded mostly by built environments: our homes, our cities, and the awkward liminal spaces between places that we care about. They are designed primarily for utility, but often lack some aspect of richness that we clearly need. The health and mental benefits we ascribe to nature exposure is proof of the gulf left by nature’s absence.

Paradoxically, our purpose-built environments often do very little to help us in the tasks we are assigned. The modern world is full of frustrating experiences, worsened by a one-size-fits-all design philosophy which inevitably serves nobody.

What if we could return a spark of life to our drab surroundings, drawing on our ancient knowledge to build a world that is more humane?

Through a combination of technology and design, recent innovations will allow us to transform utilitarian spaces into helpful allies in our daily lives. We can bring personality and responsiveness to the objects we create, equipping them with insight into our needs, and constructing a world more intuitive to inhabit.

This revolution will not be driven by generative AI and city-sized supercomputers. Instead, it’s enabled by embedded AI: simple intelligence that has broken free of servers and spread out into a constellation of smaller systems, like those that exist within our household gadgets.

Instead of automating our world through centralized intelligence, we can place a tiny spark of insight into every object we make. We can add contextual understanding to every interaction, so your tools know what you’re trying to build and can help you along the way.

With embedded AI, we can do this without compromising our privacy. No servers are involved, no Internet connection is required, so we can build sensing and interactivity into public and private spaces without creating a panopticon.

In nature, the co-evolution of living things creates an environment with innate cues and opportunities. A hungry animal seeks out ripe fruit, following scents and colors presented by plants dependent on foragers to disperse their seeds. A predator is warned away from an insect’s bright color, the mutually beneficial signal of the defensive poison it contains. Flowers bloom at the perfect moment for the pollinators that attend to them, and birds of different species sing collaborative warnings of approaching harm.

Not all of nature is cooperative, but the great network of life is filled with deliberate systems for information sharing. To human beings, with cognitive abilities that enable us to learn at a rate far faster than evolution, our encounters with these systems feel like magic.

We marvel at the beautiful fruits, changing hue to signal ripeness, that hang conveniently within reach. We watch the signs of animals, who carve trails that help us navigate, and lead us to sources of water. We observe changes in plants and the colors of their leaves, helping us mark the seasons’ progress. It all seems designed for our convenience. The enchanted forest is real.

My morning routine: I wake, check my phone for messages, look for early meetings in my calendar app, tap through to the weather. Pull on my running shoes, open my phone, choose an album or audiobook based on my mood, fiddle with buttons to start my running watch. Lock the house up, run down the street. Hope the water fountain in the park is switched on today.

I get home, check apps for urgent work messages, jump in the shower. Make the same toast as every day, pushing the lever down twice when it fails to brown the first time, then leaving it too long the second. Boil the kettle for some tea. Realize too late I’m out of milk, add a reminder to my phone. Open the robot vacuum app and tell it to clean cat litter from the floor. Open the blinds. Sit down at the coffee table, put on some music with a streaming app. Eat, clean up, walk into my office and start my job.

I enjoy my mornings. None of this is painful, or deeply frustrating (besides the toaster). But it’s striking how much of my daily routine is mediated through apps. I wake up and want to know that my family are okay: the only way to find out is to pick up my phone. I need to choose some music, I poke around an app. And despite the regularity of my routine, there’s no attempt to preempt my needs. It all depends on me remembering to do stuff—and that stuff usually involves stopping in my tracks to give my focus to a screen.

The stuff that isn’t connected to my phone—the stupid toaster that doesn’t know when to stop, the water fountain in the park that is randomly turned off on hot days, the fiddly running watch—provide their own unique friction. They’re designed for convenience but they demand attention, second-guessing, and technical expertise.

Every spirit in the enchanted forest—its plants and its creatures—has its own innate intelligence. They communicate with signals, facilitating collaborative life—or at least that’s how it feels to us. But in my daily routine, the intelligence is outsourced: it’s abstracted away to an app, which depends on some remote server. And that’s if I am lucky. For the most part, there’s no innate intelligence at all.

Our modern surroundings feel convenient. But while they may appear smart, their intelligence is powered by our own minds. Each gadget or tool demands a bit of our attention. We are the ones who read the notifications to decide what’s important. We’re the ones who pull out the toast and decide if it’s done enough. We’re the ones who know it’s time for a run, so poke at the buttons to start tracking one. With every tool, we feel slightly more distracted—and slightly more burned out.

To a VIP on an exotic vacation, the ultimate treat is to delegate their attention. At a luxury resort, observant staff anticipate guests’ needs and bring them what they want before they know it: food, entertainment, delightful experiences. The guest doesn’t have to worry about day-to-day life; the resort takes on that burden, for a time.

We enjoy these experiences because they are far from modern life, which demands our constant engagement. They recall the dream of the enchanted forest, where a vast and beautiful system works to anticipate and fulfill our desires.

With embedded AI, we finally have the technological tools to identify human needs based on contextual cues, and to personalize experiences for everyone. We have the opportunity to design a new modern world that is more responsive and autonomous: tools to which we can delegate intelligence, as opposed to dumb surrogates that are powered by our own stretched attention.

My favorite thing about embedded AI is that it achieves all this by demolishing the idea of networking. There’s horror in the early 21st century vision of a fully networked planet, constantly monitored by swarms of sensors that report back to central servers. This was always a deal with the devil: we surveil ourselves in exchange for convenience.

Instead, embedded AI helps us put intelligence inside our tools. When intelligence happens locally, there’s no need for information to leave the room - so we can preserve privacy and avoid the expensive digital panopticon of IoT.

Instead, we can build smaller, humbler systems that glean context from their environments and respond accordingly, no server required. Running on commodity hardware, these devices can be incredibly cheap and energy efficient. They will be pervasive, but not networked. This transforms the entire business model, since there’ll be no need for subscriptions to support back-end infrastructure. Hardware gets to be hardware once again.

Embedded AI gives us the opportunity to design a new world that is responsive to human needs. It can even help us coexist with nature in a respectful and synergistic way, increasing our ability to exchange information with our environments. By doing all this without networks, we can avoid the dystopia of ever-present tracking sold to us as inevitable for the past twenty years.

To construct this world, we’ll need new design patterns and interaction design practices—not just for new gadgets, which will appear first, but for the spaces and environments that are built with these technologies in mind.

We will have to create an entire new theory of human-computer interaction, where intelligence is dispersed across our environment instead of centralized in all-in-one devices, locked away behind a network, or diverted from our overstretched attention.

This process will be led by a new generation of designers, tasked with bringing us home to the primordial forest of our collectively imagined youth. It will be a more human place to live.