Sharing one of my favorite newsletters today.
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Fear & loathing of A.I. ⊗ Rising tide rents & robber baron rents ⊗ To-day & to-morrow
No.308 — The Radiant Future! (Of 1995) ⊗ The Dark Forest and the post-individual ⊗ What if a city becomes carbon neutral?
Newsletter
Fear & loathing of A.I.
Jon Evans with a fun and well-informed article on “why/how to stop worrying and neither fear nor loathe AI.” He looks at the various flash points of discussion or fighting around AI, including nomenclature, illegality, immortality, techbros, irrelevance, hallucinations, unemployment, energy, and Skynet.
I agree with the vast majority of his arguments except two. I think he gives quite a bit of a break to techbros. His points are good, but gloss over the impacts of big tech, the skewed incentives of the VC ecosystem, and the sheer madness of a non-trivial slice of the people swimming in this petri dish of crackpot ideas and self-reenforcing reality distortion fields. I mean, come on (I’d hoped this wasn’t real but it looks like it is).
The other one is “against climate doom,” which is largely about energy use. I agree that there are misunderstanding in there and there are few good analyses, but he dismisses most of that line of inquiry saying “clean energy is abundant.”
It is, if compared to when it was nearly nonexistent, but it’s nowhere near abundant compared to all the energy we need now, and even less so compared to what’s going to be needed to switch virtually everything to electric. As we saw last week, part of the issue is the need to reframe how we think about energy when it’s abundant, but it’s nowhere near the case now. And AI is booming now. Jon only mentions training, but using them also uses up a lot of energy, and cooling servers also uses a lot of water.
Well worth a read, just some caveats on those two points.
It’s true that there are some good arguments that generative AI is not transformative ‘fair use.’ But it’s also true that there are very strong arguments that it is, and it’s annoyingly disingenuous for either side to pretend otherwise. […]
AI-generated content is choking our Internet … or, more precisely, our search engines and social media … but when you step back and think about what we might be transitioning away from, was that advertising-driven SEO-orchestrated social-media-distributed internet really such a wondrous utopia? I seem to recall rather a lot of criticism of it even before generative AI. I think a move back to a more curated, less SEO-driven internet will be a good thing. […]
When you use modern AI models as anything-from-anything machines, and you feed them good data, and don’t try to force their answers into a format they can’t manage from that data, they don’t hallucinate. I won’t say they’re always right, mind you. Again, they’re about on par with (an arbitrary number of) college interns. But they consistently generate good outputs.
Rising tide rents & robber baron rents
Tim O’Reilly with an enshittification-adjacent piece on innovation, economic rent, Amazon, and Google. Basically, most of big tech and more specifically those two, are seeing the end of profit generated from growing new markets (rising tides) and have been switching to extracting all the dollars they can (robber baron rents). In their cases, by destroying search results with paid placements that take a seemingly ever increasing share of what’s shown to users. Even if you’ve read Doctorow’s shit-based argument, this one is a good read from a different angle and in a completely different tone.
From what I can tell, another piece threading some of the same paths is Ed Zitron’s The Man Who Killed Google Search. Everyone was already sharing so I didn’t prioritise reading it for this issue but looks good.
“If the reward accruing to an actor is larger than their contribution to value creation, then the difference may be defined as rent. This can be due to the ownership of a scarce asset, the creation of monopolistic conditions that enable rising returns in a specific sector, or policy decisions that favour directly or indirectly a specific group of interest.” […]
[Herbert Simon in 1971 (!!):] “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” […]
Disruptive technologies start out by solving new problems, serving new markets, and creating new opportunities. But their disruptive quality also comes because novel technology companies draw outside the lines that have been drawn to protect the business model of the existing players. […]
Regulators would be wise to get ahead of this development. The current generation of algorithmic overlords shape the attention of their users, helping to decide what we read and watch and buy, whom we befriend and whom we believe. The next generation will shape human cognition, creativity, and interaction even more profoundly.
To-day & to-morrow
In my shortlist for this issue all I had left were very long reads I didn’t feel like getting into, and way too many other articles on AI so I thought I’d swing back to something kind of blew my mind a few weeks ago as I was digging into some research for a client. Exactly a century ago, the To-day and To-morrow book series was edited by C. K. Ogden for the British publisher Kegan Paul and envisioned technological advancements like computers, cyborg existence, communication technologies, interconnected minds, and the potential for human intelligence to be transferred to machines.
Books were written by J. D. Bernal (he of the Bernal sphere), Bertrand and Dora Russel, the geneticist JBS Haldane, and a host of others, a hundred writers in all for 110 volumes. The breath and prescience of ideas in that series is incredible and Ogden seems to have been impressively sharp in identifying original thinkers.
More → The piece above is quite long, you can also check out Max Sounders’ shorter piece for the BBC.
There are striking parallels between their time and ours. The contributors were responding to rapid developments in new communications and information technologies – especially the telephone, cinema, radio, and television. Several of the volumes are pioneers in what would later turn into cultural studies and media studies. They were also poised on the brink of the next disruption: the realization of the digital computer, which would change everything. […]
He imagines humans colonizing space by constructing what we would now call biospheres, or even Bernal spheres, capable of supporting large populations, and traveling through the universe to explore other worlds, while remaining in communication with each other. […]
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil is also one of the earliest elaborations of what has become known as the “brain in a vat” hypothesis – teasing out how much of our personal identity and experience inheres in our brain. […]
Bernal wonders about the possibility that his longer-living but still mortal brains, encased in their life-support machines, would be able to communicate their ideas so fully to each other that they would combine to form a single super-brain or “compound mind” – what science fiction writers (since at least Olaf Stapledon) have called a “group mind” or “hive-mind.” Bernal's electronic, wireless version of this concept is probably the first formulation of what media theorists now call the “networked self.”
§ The Radiant Future! (Of 1995). Great short post by Charlie Stross, in lieu of “a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetsons style short story” he’d like to write, where the dot com crash never happened. “The world of MP3 music players is dominated by Archos. Video is ... well, video as such isn't allowed on the public internet because the MPAA hooked up with the cable TV corporations to force legislation mandating blockers inside all ISPs. Napster does not exist. Bittorrent does not exist. YouTube does not exist. But what passes for video on the internet today is 100% Macromedia Flash, so things could be worse.”
§ The Dark Forest and the post-individual. What if the mesaverse instead of the metaverse? “The internet isn’t meant to give a graphical representation of our bodies. The internet is what allows what’s inside — our minds, our souls, our many selves — to interact with the insides of others. The internet is where our alts come alive, our internal monologues become dialogues, and a stray thought becomes a globally resonant meme. This is its miracle.”
Futures, Fictions & Fabulations
What if a city becomes carbon neutral?
“Besides producing renderings of what that Rome of the future might look like, Gianluca collaborated with me to prototype what neighborhoods might feel like when the city reaches its objective and becomes carbon neutral. We gathered observations and weak signals for multiple questions: What would the traffic of people and goods look like? What would be the new points of interest for tourists and locals, which ones would remain relevant, etc?”
Human Futures, March 2024
Some of the articles included: reflections on the Futures of Work; a possible cognitive divide when we introduce AI based cognitive servants; the personal evolution of futures consciousness; the need for global consciousness as a state of planetary futures; the intersection of AI futures for creativity and artistic expression.
Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling
Talk transcripts can be hit and miss, especially when the person delivering the talk has a unique way of doing it. I’ve only scanned it so far, but Bruce Sterling’s talk from the Technology Biennial in Turin this month seems up our collective alley.
Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations
Generative AI in Premiere Pro powered by Adobe Firefly
Short demo showing seemingly seamless editing of video, adding or removing objects, extending scenes, replacing backgrounds, inserting AI generated transitions, etc. Bonkers technically, piling on with the rest for that ‘nothing is real anymore what can I trust?’ feeling.
VASA-1 by Microsoft Research
“Single portrait photo + speech audio = hyper-realistic talking face video with precise lip-audio sync, lifelike facial behavior, and naturalistic head movements, generated in real time.” Same feeling as above.
TikTok may add AI avatars that can make ads
“The Information reports TikTok is developing virtual influencers to promote and sell items on the platform. The AI avatars can read scripts from prompts generated by advertisers or sellers on its TikTok Shop. The feature is not live yet and could still be changed.” Same again.
Asides
- 😍 📺 🐙 New documentary from National Geographic and Disney+. Secrets of the Octopus takes us inside the world of these “aliens on Earth”. “Each of the three episodes focuses on a specific unique feature of these fascinating creatures: ‘Shapeshifters,’ ‘Masterminds,’ and ‘Social Networks.’ The animals were filmed in their natural habitats over 200 days, and all that stunning footage is accompanied by thoughtful commentary by featured scientists.”
- 😯 🗿 🖼️ 🇬🇧 Spooky! Antony Gormley Time Horizon. “Some works are buried, allowing only a part of the head to be visible, while others are buried to the chest or knees according to the topography. Only occasionally do they stand on the existing surface. Around a quarter of the works are placed on concrete columns that vary from a few centimetres high to rising four meters off the ground.”
- 😨 🏙️ 🌊 🇨🇳Almost Half of All Major Chinese Cities Are Sinking, Study Says. “45% of China's urban land was sinking faster than 3 mm a year, while 16% was sinking at a rate of more than 10 mm a year. The study authors looked at 82 Chinese cities with populations of more than 2 million and used radar pulses from satellites to identify any changes in the distance between the satellite and the ground.”
- 😍 🖼️ 🦜 🌱 🇩🇪 I’m a sucker for these kinds of illustrations. Flip Through More than 5,000 Pages of This Sprawling 19th-Century Atlas of Natural History. “In the early 19th century, German naturalist Lorenz Oken quickly established himself as a leader in the Naturphilosophie movement, a current of Idealism, which attempted to comprehend a total view of nature by investigating its theoretical structure—a precursor to the natural sciences as we know them today.”
- 👏🏼 🐟 🇨🇦 🇺🇸 Canada, Alaska suspend fishing of Yukon River chinook salmon for 7 years. “In a bid to help the recovery of the Yukon River chinook salmon run, the federal government and the State of Alaska have agreed to implement a seven-year moratorium on fishing the species. The suspension, in effect for one full life cycle of a salmon, includes commercial fishing and recreational angling in the Yukon River and its Canadian tributaries.”
- 👏🏼 🌳 🇧🇷 Fires surge in the Amazon, but deforestation continues to fall. “Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has continued on a downward trajectory despite a sharp increase in fires associated with the severe drought in the region.” (This one and the previous via Fix The News.)
Your Futures Thinking Observatory
Reading Saito in Kagoshima ⊗ Navigating the polycrisis ⊗ Reconsidering the role of AI
No.309 — A futures library ⊗ The Future of Work is Entering its Synth Era ⊗ AI brings Immanuel Kant back to life
Reading Saito in Kagoshima
I love me a good Dan Hill essay and he’s been relatively silent for the last little while, which doubles the pleasure of reading his thinking here. Kohei Saito studied Marx’s lesser known environmental writing and built on that to write about and advocate for a deliberate slowdown and a new economics based on reclaiming the commons for a thriving future.
Hill mixes some ideas from Saito’s writings with his own critique, some examples of degrowth in Japan, the commons, and what design can accomplish. He believes that the problem with the philosopher’s vision “does not lie with the analysis (why things are how they are) but rather, with the synthesis (what they could be instead).” Hill uses his own practice and examples seen in Kagoshima prefecture to kind of flesh out what bioregional-level degrowth (or slow growth) might look like within a larger Saitoish global context.
The three most salient points for me are; that forced degrowth, because of a shrinking and aging population results, in some places, in a change of how property is valued, making possible these community projects and a re-commoning of resources. Slow growth instead of degrowth, but ‘growth’ as in nature, not as in capitalism (full quote highlighted below). Hill’s two great word combinations, “culture and cultures [(fermentation)]” and “composting of value and a compositing of ideas.”
In these small towns, the patterns of enterprise seemed more redolent of the biological processes of fermentation, as with the local koji, than the normative extractive language of start-up and scale-up. […]
What strikes me about the people we meet in Kagoshima are these patterns of slowness, patience, resourcefulness, ‘staying with’ complex local systems, building health and pleasure – an even reciprocity between nature and culture. […]
This is not degrowth. Instead, amid the koji and kindergartens, we see another dynamic. Perhaps growth as in a forest, rather than a Tesla or an Exxon. A forest grows without destroying everything around it. But it still grows. This is an organic growth, a slow growth, and as Suzanne Simard has shown, the forest is a far more complex and ambitious idea than anything modernity has yet realised. The growth is more akin to the fermentation, of culture and cultures, that sits underneath those Kagoshima stories. […]
Design’s job is to work similarly with ambiguity, but also to draw freely from science, engineering, arts and humanities in order to articulate possible futures; to capture the essence of ideas like Saito’s slowdown and bring them closer to form, to things, into experiences, situations, structures and settings in which to encounter these ideas. […]
It is somehow more mundane, more everyday. Yet there’s a quietly complex, determined beauty to these unfolding relationships, a composting of value and a compositing of ideas, immersed in a specific sense of place drawn from both deep past and near future.
More → By the way, the piece is found in the Future Observatory Journal’s first issue, themed Bioregioning. Looks fantastic. The essays Donella Meadows Revisited, Lo-Fab (which features the work of MASS Design), and Justin McGuirk’s interview with Arturo Escobar have drawn my attention.
Navigating the polycrisis
This piece is an edited excerpt from Michael J. Albert’s book Navigating the Polycrisis. In short, amidst the many interconnected crises, futures work can help us orient towards different and more survivable futures. “‘Business-as-usual’ will come to an end—whether by choice or by disaster. Thus we need more future-oriented scholarship that can illuminate the possible roads ahead, their branching pathways, the dangers that lurk, and the opportunities that may emerge for progressive transformation.”
As I was reading, this trio of concepts popped into my head; ‘Futurity, transdisciplinarity, planetarity.’ Kiiind of what the newsletter is about, no?
Albert talks about concrete utopias, where “speculation must negotiate the tension between radical imagination and rigorous social, political, and ecological analysis of the possible. In other words, it emerges from the always fraught encounter between utopianism and realism.” Love it!
Note for the generalists, neo-generalists and other self-taught (and self-thought?) autodidact lifelong learners, towards the end he writes about who will be able to create this important work. “Rather than ultra-specialized experts, it is the agile and curious—those who venture far outside their disciplinary comfort zones, seeking out new insights from other fields and opposing perspectives that challenge their thinking—who are best placed to connect the dots and develop more realistic maps of the future.”
In a word, it must be “transdisciplinary,” in the sense of pragmatist scholarship that emerges directly from problems in the world demanding response (rather than from stale disciplinary debates) and that synthesizes knowledge across numerous disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological traditions. […]
To do this well, in a way that moderates (but does not entirely avoid) the risk of wishful thinking, we need a rigorous, transdisciplinary approach that can illuminate the constraints, obstacles, opportunities, and mechanisms of change that structure the future possibility space.
More → Found in Johannes Kleske’s latest, where he writes about a theoretical foundation for Critical Futures Studies.
Reconsidering the role of AI: valuing process over output
Nice short post by Jorge Arango on the value of using AI to support humans rather than replacing them. AI should be seen as a tool to aid in processes like analyzing data or designing, not as a replacement for human thinking. He gives the example of personal knowledge management (PKM), where “notes are evidence that thinking happened — but they are not the thinking itself. If you only get the outcome (i.e., a set of notes and connections between them), you haven’t learned.” What good then are automated notes? You have more of them but you haven’t done any thinking.
It reminds me of a piece from last year, where danah boyd explains deskilling on the job. Here’s some of what I said about it in No.263 (sorry, the re-archiving doesn’t go that far yet so no link): “An oft cited example of job replacement is the dull ‘junk labor’ young lawyers go through early in their careers, this is already being replaced by AIs but over those years they also learn the trade and are ‘socialized into the profession.’ How does that happen when they have to jump straight from school to the more complex un-automated work?”
AI can save time, but what about when the time spent on that task is as valuable or maybe even more valuable than the result? Knowledge transfer and onboarding are already very ineffective, if they exist at all, in most companies. The gap could be even wider if AI (actually, managers implementing AI in place of hiring juniors) scrapes off whole layers of roles. Same thing for individuals, people already mistake data for knowledge, if you don’t even need to do much of anything, your thinking is thinner still.
“AI” is a misnomer for the current technologies. The phrase both oversells LLMs’ capabilities and doesn’t do them justice. The word “intelligence” raises expectations LLMs can’t meet: they have no theory of mind and seem incapable of deep conceptual reasoning. […]
The key is applying them to tasks they’re well-suited to, such as analyzing, synthesizing, and manipulating data, and not for making important decisions on behalf of people.
Futures, Fictions & Fabulations
Futures library
I love this so much! Media Evolution, who have a practice of collaborative foresight, have launched an actual library, open to the public, where you can consult a great list of books in a beautiful space in Mälmo, Sweden. The section names of the library are making me a bit jealous, I might have to steal some of it.
The Future of Work is Entering its Synth Era
“The future of AI is full of paradoxes: productivity versus job displacement, innovation versus inequality, empowerment versus dependency, and enhancement versus dehumanisation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of work, where we are entering a synth era.”
How Balanced Design Leadership Can Drive Desirable Futures
“This study recognized and described the following four building blocks for designing futures: enabling the team and project, establishing future scenarios, evaluating desirable futures, and exciting people’s motivation to achieve that future.”
Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations
Agency brings Immanuel Kant back to life via AI as a 23-year-old influencer
“The entire Manu account was created using the GenAI platform STABLES. His appearance, his voice, his texts – every component of the new Kant has been translated and brought to life as authentically as possible over 300 years.”
AI image feedback loop
“Data artist Robert Hodgin recently created a feedback loop between Midjourney and ChatGPT-4 — he prompted MJ to create an image of an old man in a messy room wearing a VR headset, asked ChatGPT to describe the image, then fed that description back into MJ to generate another image, and did that 10 times.”
Racist AI deepfake of Baltimore principal leads to arrest
“A high school athletic director in the Baltimore area was arrested on Thursday after he used artificial intelligence software, the police said, to manufacture a racist and antisemitic audio clip that impersonated the school’s principal.”
Asides
- 🤓 📊 Keywords of the Datafied State. “A collection of essays on concepts that are central to understanding the relationship between government and technology, and how it differs across geographies.”
- 💡 🎬 🎥 Inside ILM | To be a Generalist. “At Industrial Light & Magic, Generalists possess a high degree of proficiency across multiple disciplines including modeling, lighting, texturing, shading/look development, FX, matte painting, animation, shot composition, and rendering. Take a deep dive into what makes the team unique.” (Via NFL’s Discord.)
- 👏🏼 💉 🔬 Science! How many lives have vaccines saved? New WHO study comes out with breathtaking estimate.. “Vaccines alone, the researchers find, accounted for 40 percent of the decline in infant mortality. The paper — authored by a team of researchers led by WHO epidemiologist and vaccine expert Naor Bar-Zeev — estimates that in the 50 years since 1974, vaccines prevented 154 million deaths.” (Via Fix The News.)
- 🤩 🎭 🖼️ Ronald Jackson’s Masked Portraits of Imaginary Characters Stoke Curiosity About Their Stories. “In his bold oil paintings, Jackson illuminates imagination itself. He began to incorporate masks as a way to enrich his own exploration of portraiture while simultaneously kindling a sense of curiosity about the individuals and their histories. Rather than portraying someone specific, each piece asks, ‘Who do you think this is?’”
- 🐊 🌎 👏🏼 First ever planet-wide analysis shows conservation work is making a measurable difference. “All the money and effort spent on biodiversity conservation is not just a little bit better than doing nothing at all, they found, but many times greater.”
- 👏🏼 🦅 🐦⬛ 🇨🇦 In Coastal British Columbia, the Haida Get Their Land Back. “The BC government formally recognizes Haida ownership of all the lands of Haida Gwaii. This is the first time in Canadian history that the colonial government has recognized Indigenous title across an entire terrestrial territory, and it’s the first time this kind of recognition has occurred outside of the courts.”
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2405.15 - 10:10
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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