Article by Yoshinari Nishiki
Main Topic:
Sir Robin Saxby is an English engineer and most known for his work as the founding CEO and chairman of ARM Holdings, which is now a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. Through personal connections, I somehow became acquainted with Robin from around 2016. While I exchanged with him many opinions on the possibilities of business applications for my artistic concepts, I had only met him in person twice. This was our third time to physically meet, being invited to his residence in a suburb of London and to have lunch in the area. Typically around this time of the year, Robin is hiding away in the mountains of Switzerland (skiing), but luckily for me, he happened to be in England for some days, and at a time that I was planning to visit the country.
Upon arrival to Robin’s place, which is a former residence of a local vicar (senior priest) built in the early 19th century, he showed to me all of the paintings he had made over the years in different spots he visited for various reasons. Robin then took me to his “lab”, which also functions as a museum and a sports gym. The lab was built inside a former horse barn on the premises, and he works on past technologies in his spare time, which is very little.
“When I was 13, I started to fix electronics to earn money.” It was the beginning of Robin’s journey as an engineer. He showed me one of the oldest transistors, of which he said, “the number of transistors evolved from 50 to 50 billion (50,000,000,000).” At that moment, I saw a clear connection from what he was occupied with as a teenager, to the founding CEO of ARM. Like it’s mentioned in the book Mobile unleashed: the origin and evolution of ARM processors in our devices, it was not a straight forward process to make the ARM architecture, but in a sense it was a natural process for Robin, that’s the feeling I got.
For Robin, old technologies are not obsolete, but rather useful in terms of determining the solidness of a piece of technology from a given moment. Since latest technologies are not necessarily the best, understanding old technologies helps you go back to a historical point and allows you to rethink the state of now.
Robin also claims that he has been “(un)making throughout his life.” (Un)making is the topic of my PhD research which is a variant of unmaking (please notice it is without a pair of brackets), which is a counterpart to making (as in the Maker movement). Unmaking looks at reframing the general goals of making in order to better address the environmental urgency of our planet. To extend unmaking to an extreme, (un)making focuses on creativity in avoiding production to foster ecological value creation.
In the “museum” he built inside the barn were a number of gramophones and vintage machines. A demonstration of how a TV works before its existence drew my attention in particular. It reminded me of when I had to explain what AR was to non-researchers before Pokemon GO came about.
Conversation over (un)making: The reason why I wanted to meet Robin was to discuss about (un)making. I had already sent him some descriptions about the concept in advance so he already knew the outlines, but he asked me, “among all the world’s problems we have today, what can (un)making fix?”
My answer was, “(un)making can resolve the duplications in production and people’s efforts.” Since everybody has to make their own ends meet, they engage in some kind of productive activities. However, the scope of these activities are too biased by how monetary value is generated, people end up with more or less the same kinds of things, making duplications of production.
Robin listened to me for a while before saying, “for me, the biggest problem is having to show quarterly earnings growth.”
I felt that we basically have the same view, but Robin sees the problem lying in the basic protocol of how a business operates.
I also talked about my own ambition about where I’d like to take (un)making to, and how it may have some similarities to the way the ARM architecture is situated in the current economic climate. My PhD research has been somewhat loose in terms of approach, but after the appointment with Robin was fixed, I was thinking my approach should be more systematic, or in my own word, mechanical.
About the AI hype: We naturally ended up talking about the current AI hype. One of the issues that Robin sees is that companies compete with each other rather than sharing. After all, OpenAI is not open at all.
However, the biggest issue of the AI hype is that “[t]hey can do the complicated stuff really well but quickly fall over on the stuff that 5-year-old children can do, implying that they are not really reasoning but merely offering a sophisticated simulation of it.” (this is from a link later shared by Robin [1])
Robin said, “AI is fear of missing out, money, and power.”
Unpredictable political situation: In the age of techno feudalism (the owners of big tech became the world’s feudal overlords) [2], we are re-witnessing global conflicts akin to before WWII. When the world is full of garbage, both online and offline, Robin says that it’s important not to overreact.
Conclusion: After the conversation, we moved to a local pub/restaurant for lunch. Robin had several appointments after ours, but postponed them slightly so that we could finish an entire bottle of white wine!
References:
- https://www.radiofreemobile.com/artificial-intelligence-spray-and-pray/
- https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781529926095
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