On not choosing nice versions of AI – This day’s portion
Whenever anyone states that “AI is the future, so…” or “many people are using AI anyway, so…” they are not only expressing an opinion — they‘re shaping that future.
Link tags: future
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The line and the stream. — Ethan Marcotte
I’ve come to realize that statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells. When someone describes
somethingto you as the future, they’re sharing a heartfelt belief that thissomethingwill be part of whatever comes next. “Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere” quite literally involves casting a technology forward into time. How could that be anything else but a kind of magic?
gilest.org: A chat with 19-year-old me
I love this conversation.
The sound of inevitability | My place to put things
People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future.
This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.
CSS Intelligence: Speculating On The Future Of A Smarter Language — Smashing Magazine
This is a really thoughtful look at the evolution of CSS and the ever-present need to balance power with learnability.
Vision for W3C
We believe the World Wide Web should be inclusive and respectful of all participants: a Web that supports facts over falsehoods, people over profits, humanity over hate.
The web was always about redistribution of power. Let’s bring that back.
Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.
The Sunshine by the Sea: S20E08 - Harsh Browns
Research by the Sea was one of the best conferences I’ve been to in yeeeeeears. So many good, useful, inspiring, thoughtful, provocative talks. Much more about ethics and power and possibility than I’d expected. None of the ‘utopian bullshit’ you usually get at a product or digital conference, to quote one of the speakers!
Chimes at Midnight—Asterisk
It’s been an idea for over three decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?
The Value Of Science by Richard P. Feynman [PDF]
This short essay by Richard Feynman is quite a dose of perspective on a Monday morning
Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part One, 1982) - YouTube
Wow! Grace Hopper has always been a hero to me, but I had no idea she was such a fantastic presenter. She’s completely engaging, with the timing and deadpan delivery of a stand-up comedian at times.
Kardashev Street
Matt has made a new website for tracking our collective progress levelling up the Kardashev scale:
Maximising energy generation, distribution and usage at street level, for as many people as possible, everyday.
The Gods of Logic, by Benjamín Labatut
Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
Futuristic Progressive Enhancement - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
We’re all tired of: write some code, come back to it in six months, try to make it do more, and find the whole project is broken until you upgrade everything.
Progressive enhancement allows you to do the opposite: write some code, come back to it in six months, and it’s doing more than the day you wrote it!
The next decade of the web | James’ Coffee Blog
Things can be different:
The core value of the IndieWeb, individual empowerment, helped me realise a fundamental change in perspective: that the web was beautiful and at times difficult, but that we, the people, were in control.
Donuts and Dyson Spheres – Petafloptimism
I really, really like this post from Matt (except for the bit where he breaks Simon’s rule).
Muscular imagination
Robin Sloan on The Culture:
The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently articulate and defend their values. (Their enthusiasm for their own politics is considered annoying by most other civilizations.)
Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.
I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.
Revisiting Metadesign for Murph – Smithery
I’m really excited about John’s talk at this year’s UX London. Feels like a good time to revisit his excellent talk from dConstruct 2015:
I’m going to be opening up the second day of UX London 2024, 18th-20th June. As part of that talk, I’ll be revisiting a talk called Metadesign for Murph which I gave at dConstruct in 2015. It might be one of my favourite talks that I’ve ever given.
Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change ‹ Literary Hub
Beautiful writing from Rebecca Solnit, that encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say:
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby.
Return to UX London – Smithery
I’m very excited that John is speaking at this year’s UX London!