Clusters of unidentified drones spotted in New York and New Jersey
FBI investigation under way as residents across US north-east report mysterious aircraft sightings for weeks
Reckons
A treasure trove of tech history goes online with the unveiling of the Nokia Design Archive
Aalto University launches the Nokia Design Archive, an online repository that charts the pioneering history of Finland’s legendary mobile phone manufacturer
Hyperstition - 0rphan Drift Archive
by Delphi Carstens. Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words 'hyper' and 'superstition' to describe the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Akin to neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins' concept of memes, hyperstitions work at the deeper evolutionary level of social organisation in that they influence the course taken by cultural evolution. Unlike memes, however, hyperstitions describe a specific category of ideas. Coined by renegade academics, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), hyperstition describes both the effects and the mechanisms of apocalyptic postmodern 'phase out' or 'meltdown' culture.
What Does It Mean to Decolonize Design?
“Decolonization” is a word we’re increasingly hearing at design events, often being used interchangeably with “diversity.” It’s important to emphasize that while the terms are linked, they shouldn’t be confused. Diversity is about bringing more people to the table. Decolonization is about changing t
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Just Design
Being Dogmatic about Defining
Speculative Critical Design Future Fiction
The Magnificent Bribe — Real Life
Half a century ago, Lewis Mumford developed a concept that explains why we trade autonomy for convenience
We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’
The allure of AI companions is hard to resist. Here’s how innovation in regulation can help protect people.
AI companionship is no longer theoretical—our analysis of a million ChatGPT interaction logs reveals that the second most popular use of AI is sexual role-playing. We are already starting to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers.
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.
It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit.
After software eats the world, what comes out the other end?
Malkovich. Malkovich. Malkovich?
Meet the Guys Dating AI Girlfriends
Flirty, sexy, seductive, supportive. Your AI companion can be whatever you want her to be. And now a growing number of men are turning to bots to ease their loneliness or satisfy their kinks. The choices are endless. The emotions are real.
Civil engineering firms working in Saudi Arabia silent despite 21,000 confirmed worker fatalities
ITV’s Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia features undercover reporting on the ground in the nati...
💡 The foundations of AI
ChatGPT, Claude and other language models have dominated the mainstream discussions and use. However the future of AI lies in models outside of language.
The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
Drowning in Slop
A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage — and it’s only going to get worse.
The Subprime AI Crisis
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
The Other Bubble
Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom.
In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)
I look forward to your feedback.
Seeing Like a Simulation | Los Angeles Review of Books
Reviewing Chaim Gingold’s “Building SimCity,” Celine Nguyen finds similarities between tech billionaires’ attempts to build a utopian city in Solano, California, and being a godlike player in “SimCity.”
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become.
The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires.
We’re in a race to the bottom that everyone saw coming and no one is happy with. Meanwhile, the search for product-market fit at a scale that would justify all the inflated tech-company valuations keeps coming up short. Even OpenAI’s latest release, o1, was accompanied by a caveat from Altman that “it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.”
The project of techno-optimism, for decades now, has been to insist that if we just have faith in technological progress and free the inventors and investors from pesky regulations such as copyright law and deceptive marketing, then the marketplace will work its magic and everyone will be better off.
Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don’t get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present
AI scaling myths
Scaling will run out. The question is when.
This is where your smartphone battery begins
Workers, including children, labor in harsh and dangerous conditions to meet the world’s soaring demand for cobalt, a mineral essential to powering electric vehicles, laptops, and smartphones, according to an investigation by The Washington Post.
The Sustained Two-Shot
What do you do when you’ve got two actors, a bunch of dialogue, and only enough time to get one camera angle? Consider one of the oldest tools in the filmmak...
Centre for Strategic Foresight 15th Anniversary
AI Has Become a Technology of Faith - The Atlantic
Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington told me that they believe generative AI can help millions of suffering people. I’m not so sure.
The State of Chinese AI
SOTA research, chips, sanctions, and loopholes
No one buys books
Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.
The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
Books by the Obamas sold so many copies they had to be removed from the charts as statistical anomalies.
Sometimes it’s just a timing issue, like Marie Kondo. She did a book about Joy at Work, about making your office sparked with joy because it’s not cluttered. It published in March of 2020.
Gen AI: too much spend, too little benefit?
Design Education Advisory Committee - DesignSingapore Council
The Design Education Advisory Committee (DEAC) calls for a ‘Future Design School’, where design thinking is part of everyday learning from primary school.
Explaining the Degrowth Movement. Is Degrowth Economics Possible?
A primer on degrowth as an alternative economic model to current late capitalism. Plus: unpacking terms like degrowth communism, ecological economics, ecosocialism, green growth, and post-growth.