PEACE, LOVE, AND PROCESSING POWER

In a time thick with paranoia about runaway tech and Al overload, maybe it’s time we asked: Don’t machines need love, too?

- INDRAN PARAMASIVAM

THE ISSUE YOU'RE HOLDING in your hands, dear reader, is our annual celebration of watches. It celebrates human ingenuity and is an extended editorial parade to honour our practice of legitimising and ornamentalising a human construct with deep reverence and lavishness.

No one can deny that marvelling at complications and situating horology firmly within the semantic and physical scope of beauty is humanity's way of acknowledging that we love the things we make and the pursuit of transcendence through craft, care, and labour. Yet, it's obvious that we have a complicated relationship with the things we make. Some things have benefited us all; some have elevated certain groups while disenfranchising the rest. Some have enriched our planet, others have blighted it. Some we need, and some we don't. Some we cannot go back from, and some we need to banish.

But there is one thing whose influence saturates all the above dichotomies, one made by us but is on the verge of overpowering us. The idea and actualisation that is Technology, whether as code or Machine.

I can't remember how old I was when I first heard Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator menacingly and Germanically utter the three diabolical words in James Cameron's reputation-igniting The Terminator (1984): “I'll be back”.