Reckons

Modern AI puts us firmly into an age of exploration of computational reality

Design thinking has failed to deliver on its promise to solve the world’s thorniest social challenges. Adopting a critical design stance can help designers serve communities, rather than their own methodology.

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

Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.

archived 12 Dec 2023 14:44:32 UTC

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

Sam Altman’s weekend of shock and drama began a year ago, with the release of ChatGPT.

OpenAI, Microsoft, and the OpenOffspring

Dan Hill is Director of the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. He is a leader in Strategic Design, a mode of practice directed toward...

The storied design consultancy Ideo has been shedding staff throughout 2023 as it navigates a future where its traditional services are less in demand.

Global carbon dioxide emissions from energy use and industry could peak as soon as this year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of figures from the IEA.

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?

On Robert Irwin, Star Trek, and the infinite hallways of the future.

The aestheticization of the struggle to integrate technological innovation is a dangerous path.

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

“Prove your value.” “Justify your presence.” “Demonstrate impact.” Too many organizations have convinced designers that they’re the…

Rest of World analyzed 3,000 AI images to see how image generators visualize different countries and cultures.

We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.

The technology has resulted in a host of cutting-edge AI applications — but its real power lies beyond text generation

ChatGPT and other new AI services benefit from a science fiction-infused marketing frenzy unlike anything in recent memory. There's more to fear here than killer robots.

This corporate gathering full of artists’ drab, desperate attempts to get bought by clueless rich collectors has domesticated contemporary art and thus killed it

Andrew Knight, Head of UK Policy Design Community, invites designers to participate in the Public Design Review.

It hardly needs to be said that all is not well with our world. We are disempowered, isolated and (quite rationally)...

New report from industry researchers finds that 95 percent of the once-hyped crypto assets have hit rock-bottom valuation

Wowed by a new paper I just read and wish I had thought to write myself. Lukas Berglund and others, led by Owain Evans, asked a simple, powerful, elegant question: can LLMs trained on A is B infer automatically that B is A? The shocking (yet, in historical context, see below, unsurprising) answer is no:

Walter Isaacson tried to write a "Great Man" biography of the rockets-and-cars genius. That's not an effective way to understand Elon Musk.

Technology can realize greatly intensified forms of continuous democratic participation, but such applications must be openly developed and publicly owned.