Reckons

And LOTR is brain-rot for technologists

Issue #1: A new magazine of stories, studies, and science

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.

Half a century ago, Lewis Mumford developed a concept that explains why we trade autonomy for convenience

ChatGPT, Claude and other language models have dominated the mainstream discussions and use. However the future of AI lies in models outside of language.

Scaling will run out. The question is when.

Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington told me that they believe generative AI can help millions of suffering people. I’m not so sure.

The Design Education Advisory Committee (DEAC) calls for a ‘Future Design School’, where design thinking is part of everyday learning from primary school.

Because that's what we're throwing away

In a complex world, foresight methodologies offer an alternative to prediction. This approach can help map new possibilities to plan for future disruption.

The immediate future of generative AI looks a bit like Facebook’s past.

Programming Note: Summer Lightning will be on a break till the new year. Thanks to everyone who has supported my writing in the last year. This is the 57th and last edition of the newsletter for 2023. I will pause paid subscriptions, which will resume in January 2024. You can find the archive of posts

Tech billionaires are using faith to solidify their power

Meet UN Global Pulse, the Secretary-General’s Innovation Lab

ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software? What are the products?

Imagining the future we want is the first step towards creating it, says Rob Hopkins – time traveller and imagination activist

When It Comes to Thinking About the Future, Should We Push or Pull? Prop-Up or Provoke? Conserve or Challenge? Futurists, Foresighters, and…

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was skeptical a few weeks ago: "I probably trust the answers that come out of ChatGPT the least of anybody on Earth."

A new series focused on AI literacy outside the hype-doom binary. For the first installment, Reality Studies looks at questions of labor in the context of generative AI.

After three months of striking, the AMPTP has reached out to the Writers Guild of America to resume negotiations this Friday. They’re looking to bring an end to a strike that has already cost the entertainment industry billions because entertainment executives refused to even negotiate with

The country's rise is complete, but don't expect a rapid decline.

The capacity of AI to generate content is overwhelming the web.

We need to have a chat about worldbuilding. (I’m mostly talking to the futures people, here, rather than the literature people… but the latter may find it of interest anyway, so please …

AI and Future of FuturesCall for Papers This special issue looks at AI and Futures in light of transformative developments in the fields broadly described as artificial intelligence (e.g., machine learning, natural language processing, Large Language Models, or expert systems). How will AI help reimagine the practice of Futures? How would it shape the ways in which communities imagine and build Futures?  How might Futures evolve in an AI dominated environment? How might this emergence of knowledge shape the body of knowledge? Important Dates: Extended Abstract submission deadline: August 30, 2023. Notification of acceptance for submission to JFS: November 30, 2023. Final paper submission to JFS: February 29, 2024

Our own adjunct professor Adam Cowart was recently published in the Journal of Futures Studies. Living Between Myth and Metaphor: Level 4 of Causal Layered Analysis Theorised Abstract The purpose of this paper is to propose the inclusion of emplotment and what we might call “situating metaphors'' while