Designing our Complex Future with Machines.

Open Future is looking for fellows who will contribute to our work on advancing Digital Public Space and cultivating Digital Commons. For the first time, we are opening the call to creatives. We are a small, dedicated team of advocates, researchers, and community builders working to make the internet open. We strive to question the […]

Listen to Tech Won't Save Us on Spotify. Silicon Valley wants to shape our future, but why should we let it? Every Thursday, Paris Marx is joined by a new guest to critically examine the tech industry, its big promises, and the people behind them. Tech Won’t Save Us challenges the notion that tech alone can drive our world forward by showing that separating tech from politics has consequences for us all, especially the most vulnerable. It’s not your usual tech podcast.

Listen to this episode from The Emerald on Spotify. The rise of Artificial Intelligence has generated a rush of conversation about benefits and risks, about sentience and intelligence, and about the need for ethics and regulatory measures. Yet it may be that the only way to truly understand the implications of AI — the powers, the potential consequences, and the protocols for dealing with world-altering technologies — is to speak mythically. With the rise of AI, we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Powers that used to be reserved for magicians and sorcerers — the power to access volumes of knowledge instantaneously, to create fully realized illusory otherworlds, to deceive, to conjure, to transport, to materialize on a massive scale — are no longer hypothetical. The age of metaphor is over. The mythic powers are real. Are human beings prepared to handle such powers?  While the AI conversation centers around regulatory laws, it may be that we also need to look deeper, to understand the chthonic drives at play. And when we do so, we see that the drive to create AI goes beyond narratives of ingenuity, progress, profit, or the creation of a more controllable, convenient world. Buried deep in this urge to tinker with animacy and sentience are core mythic drives —  the longing for mystery, the want to live again in a world of great powers beyond our control,  the longing for death, and ultimately, the unconscious longing for guidance and initiation. Traditionally, there was an initiatory process through which potentially world-altering knowledge was embodied slowly over time.  And so… what needs to be done about ‘The AI question’ might bear much more of a resemblance to the guiding principles of ancient magic and mystery schools than it does to questions of scientific ethics — because the drives at play are deeper and the consequences greater and the magic more real than it’s ever been before. Buckle up for a wild ride through myths of magic and human overreach, and all the kung fu movie and sci fi references you can handle. Featuring music by Charlotte Malin and Sidibe. Listen on a good sound system at a time when you can devote your full attention. Support the show

A co-learning journey with The Emerald Podcast’s Josh Schrei

Alexa's recording you. What’s she doing with it?Read Sara’s article about the privacy settings on your smart speaker: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/12/9/22...

From AI simps to manic tech overlords, Literally No Place is the short film exploring the ups and downs of artificial intelligence – and the future Big Tech doesn’t want you to see

Our latest report diagnoses concentration of power in the tech industry as a pressing challenge – and points the path forward to seize this moment of change.

Future Art Ecosystems 4: Art x Public AI provides analyses, concepts and strategies for responding to the transformations of AI systems on culture and society.

Click here to pre-register as a mentor! CIRCE’s Fellowship Programme seeks mentors to guide and assist passionate researchers, creatives, practitioners,

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This toolkit offers key organizing lessons and political directions from migrant worker and sex worker-led political collectives, formations, and organizations who face multiple and overlapping barriers while organizing, including policing and surveillance.

Become a Member of our Channel to access the entire archives of past and present Seminars.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3y-PZgkWYaxWw4Sz_UVWWg/joinBECOME...

Instructor Kazys Varnelis explores the consequences of technological transformations, tracking how networks transformed political forms and discourses.

How designers should embrace shaping AI models.

Research and innovation news alert: The Commission, together with the European Research Area countries and stakeholders, has put forward a set of guidelines to support the European research community in their responsible use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Discover amazing ML apps made by the community

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Emily Tucker, Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, on tech, vocabulary and power.

Artist using technology, computer-generated images, algorithms, motion graphics, animation and 3D printing.