Newsletter
The cloister & the starship ⊗ An environmental triumph ⊗ End GDP mania
No.373 — At The Edge of Here ⊗ The Next Four Years ⊗ There will always only be one Jane Goodall ⊗ The cross-section king
Your Futures Thinking Observatory
A carefully curated weekly newsletter finding signals of change and imagining better futures in technology, society, and culture.
Newsletter
Don’t think of AI chatbots as people ⊗ Shared reality will self-destruct ⊗ What if the Post Office had its own AI model?
No.372 — What’s guiding our Regenerative Futures? ⊗ The way we think about the future needs to change ⊗ AlphaEarth tracks Earth’s changes ⊗ England’s ice-age ghost ponds
Article
Reading and writing with AI
How we research, write, and read with AI—or not. Some tricks and recommended apps and services to leverage AI as a thinking assistant.
Newsletter
The lost art of thinking historically ⊗ How climate broke reality ⊗ Does the Bitter Lesson have limits?
No.371 — Why 95% of AI commentary fails ⊗ Designing futures you can live in ⊗ AI water usage at data centers ⊗ “Solarize everything we possibly can” ⊗ Warsaw opens metro station “express” library
Newsletter
AI gets stuck in infinite loops ⊗ A real genius club ⊗ The metabolic logic of AI slop
No.370 — It’s time to work different ⊗ Paths to better thinking ⊗ The Weight of Time ⊗ The hot air factory ⊗ The first evidence of a take-off in solar in Africa
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
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