Reckons

One of the most striking things I’ve found while reading the early WIRED back catalog is how quaint the discussions of governmental surveillance were. The magazine directed limitless outrage at any attempt by the government to regulate, censor, or surveil online behavior.

Ursula Le Guin said we must be able to imagine freedom. AI traps us in the past.

Creative skills can currently be reproduced using deep learning and neural networks, but their true potential lies in the prospects of collaboration rather than replacement. Two distinct subjectivities, one human and one automated, can meet halfway and produce a captivating mutual symbolic space, brimming with possibilities, but also with dead ends. It is both too early and arrogant to hazard a guess as to the artistic impact AI will exert in the medium term.

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."

Edge cases remain a serious, unsolved problem, a hundred billion dollars later.

Some AI makes a ton of money; a lot of it is still speculative

Notes prepared for DEFCON31 in Las Vegas

It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win

Generative AI can involve citizens directly in decision-making, but not while developers’ incentives are only financial, says Polly Curtis, chief executive of Demos

Read writing from Toby Lowe on Medium. Visiting Professor of Public Management at the Centre for Public Impact. Prone to talk about complexity. Every day, Toby Lowe and thousands of other voices read, write, and share important stories on Medium.

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.

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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

An arcane tax policy is about to reshape America’s energy economy.

The eye doctor shined a bright light into my left eye as I realized, I have stopped thinking of the future. The day was hot, the air dry. I was slowly and surely going blind, from a progressive, incurable eye disease. On my way home, I could smell wildfire smoke. Shadows trailed the edges of... Read more »

This startup wants to help millions of people whose languages are marginalized online gain better access to AI tools

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

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Tomorrow's decision-makers will need systems thinking to tackle the challenges of the future.

AI developments that made us spin

The current mania over recent advances in artificial intelligence will eventually end in disillusionment, mature regret—and new monsters

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 …

Here's what 24 hours inside of Threads has been like

Did the “creative class” learn anything from buying into a product that was obviously destined to flop?

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