Newsletter
Human literacy ⊗ Polytunity ⊗ Africa and the world map
No.369 — African time concepts and futures thinking ⊗ ChatGPT’s memory dossier ⊗ Resilient food systems ⊗ Artificial light has essentially lengthened birds’ day
Your Futures Thinking Observatory
A carefully curated weekly newsletter finding signals of change and imagining better futures in technology, society, and culture.
Newsletter
Is the AI bubble about to burst? ⊗ A life with less pleasure reading ⊗ Bringing human nature back in
No.368 — Dystopias now ⊗ Designing with Futures ⊗ LLMs’ reasoning abilities are a brittle mirage ⊗ three books dot net
Newsletter
GPT-5 and the end of naive AI futurism ⊗ All the world’s polygons ⊗ The future will be boring
No.367 — How to not build the Torment Nexus ⊗ When the future pushes back ⊗ Meta freezes AI hiring ⊗ Drones to deliver millions of mosquitoes ⊗ Bad luck, hot rocks
Newsletter
Chatbots undermining the Enlightenment ⊗ Flounder mode ⊗ Learners will inherit the earth
No.366 — Interviews with Brian Eno ⊗ Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology ⊗ Transcribing eyeglasses put subtitles on the world ⊗ NASA satellite may be destroyed on purpose ⊗ Deep sea cables that power the world
Newsletter
Think like a commoner ⊗ Governing unthinkable futures ⊗ Why we need new future archetypes
No.365 — From futurephobia to futuretopia ⊗ Computing, life, and intelligence ⊗ Robots “walk” historic building complex ⊗ The wild within the walls
Newsletter
Taste is the new intelligence ⊗ Using ChatGPT won’t make you dumb ⊗ AI first puts humans first
No.364 — The future of human health ⊗ Ten truths I’m holding about futures ⊗ A new social contract for the Age of AI ⊗ A lush tour of Fallingwater
Newsletter
Political dimensions of solarpunk ⊗ Conquering the imagination deficit ⊗ Machine readable
No.363 — Doctored Doom ⊗ Could Should Might Don’t ⊗ AI, 30 times more energy by 2035 ⊗ Ancient cooling techniques ⊗ Death of a Fantastic Machine
Newsletter
How the universe thinks without a brain ⊗ One flew over Latent Space ⊗ The lost art of research as leisure
No.362 — Future Art Ecosystems ⊗ AI scraping bots are breaking open libraries ⊗ Building a sustainable forest ecosystem ⊗ Why people are turning to bibliotherapy
Newsletter
A new political compass ⊗ Normal technology at scale ⊗ Illusion or reason?
No. 361 — The future needs better storytellers ⊗ TikTokers pretending to be AI creations ⊗ Google battling ‘fox infestation’ ⊗ Humpback whales blowing bubble rings at people
Newsletter
The new legislators of Silicon Valley ⊗ Friction it the most valuable commodity ⊗ Everything feels broken but weirdly normal
No.360 — China’s hundred lens war ⊗ The Magic of Code ⊗ Future of Air ⊗ Ukraine’s fiberoptic drone war ⊗ The magnetic forces shaping cities
Article
Vibe augmentation
I did some vibe coding yesterday, as one does these days, and had some thoughts. It was going to be a post on LinkedIn, but ended up a short article, so I'm also posting it here.
Newsletter
AI, Heidegger, & Evangelion ⊗ The new planetary nationalism ⊗ “Digital Souls”
No.359 — The who cares era ⊗ Possible Futures Issue 1 ⊗ Global electricity review ⊗ Fuel-cell aircraft ⊗ Gen Alpha slang
Newsletter
Remarks on AI from NZ ⊗ Beyond the binary ⊗ Storytelling to investigate scientific questions
No.358 — Latent futures ⊗ OpenAI unites with Jony Ive ⊗ Shanghai lets riders design their own routes ⊗ Giant Sequoias taking root in Detroit