Steering Innovation Toward Human Agency

Reading Gravity’s Rainbow in the Age of AI Reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t a task, it’s a journey, and a notoriously complex one (reading the book actually took several months), filled with shifting perspectives, technological paranoia and systems that feel larger than life. What I didn’t expect was that this postmodern novel would offer a prophetic framework for understanding the very systems I work with in the tech and AI fields. Midway through the novel, as characters chase and are chased by forces they can barely comprehend: corporations, secret networks, even self-guided missiles… I saw the uncanny similarities with the world of artificial intelligence. As Head of Innovation, I spend much of my time working on the boundaries between automation and human creativity, with systems that increasingly make decisions on our behalf. And yet, what Pynchon shows us, with almost prophetic clarity, is what happens when humans are no longer meaningfully involved in the systems they set in motion.