Here at Secrecy One Ltd, and however we look into the future, we aim to increase the value of human cognitive capabilities beyond anything we’ve suspected to this minute.
But perhaps, actually, this isn’t quite true: not unsuspected, I mean.
Many people not in tech already know how powerful human cognitive abilities really are. The challenge for many of them has been that tech people themselves have chosen to implement and execute systems that supposedly, allegedly, make human beings just about unnecessary in the workplace.
My first university education involved learning about narrative: film and literature, both. Film, it seemed to me even back in the 1980s, already demonstrated how Big Tech — which is what the film industry has been from its beginnings — chose not to automate people out of movie processes but integrate us into, industrialise us into, and maintain us at the very centre of everything that film has done. For a century too, up until generative AI has attempted lately to do for film what IT has done for decades for everything else: encourage us to believe we have no utility greater than that which machines apparently have uniquely.
But film showed me otherwise and it’s now the template my colleagues are following in Secrecy One Ltd right now. In movies, the microphone makes human voices bigger and better: more expressive. The camera is a fabulous extension of the director and photographer’s eyes. Film language — close-ups to long-shots, cutting between, dollying along — turns the acting of theatre into the most intimate of a sometimes terrifyingly defining accuracy and insight. Even the mise-en-scène, the costumes, the staging … all expand the capability of everyone contributing to a film to deepen meaning in the most subtle of ways. All that tech in collaboration with all those humans.
After all, language is also tech, and tech is also a language.
Not what IT has really aimed for, now has it? Not a collaboration generally: more like a substitution.
Well.
Now we are aiming for exactly a collaboration. Not automating us automatically and fearsomely out but bringing us back to where our utility makes us more powerful.
Not keeping humans in the machine loop, then, but keeping machines in the human loop.
Switch it round.
The video/slide-deck above very briefly explains how we see right now our projects going to market: which ones first, why, and perhaps when, too. A progress report.
Three products in the Verify Suite are listed in order of GTM by our CTO. The product pages can be found here:
The deep research project, where we really look to give human cognition a kick up the pants, has an article and video here at the moment:
Finally, the PDF of the video/slide-deck just above can be downloaded by clicking through here.