Remarks on AI from NZ ⊗ Beyond the binary ⊗ Storytelling to investigate scientific questions

Remarks on AI from NZ

As readers will know by now, I’m always interested in the intersection of AI and other intelligences, more-than-human thinking, and intriguing angles to contemplate these topics. In this short piece by Neal Stephenson, a version of a talk he gave at a private event. For many, “AI” is just text-based chatbots or image generators, but it is more and could certainly be a much greater variety of things. He explores the potential coexistence of humans with various forms of intelligence, drawing parallels between animals and a diversity of AIs.

We will likely encounter some that are like sheepdogs—performing tasks that humans cannot. “We’ll also have AIs that are like ravens, in that they are aware of us but basically don’t care about us, and ones like dragonflies that don’t even know we exist. What people worry about is that we’ll somehow end up with AIs that can hurt us, perhaps inadvertently like horses, or deliberately like bears, or without even knowing we exist, like hornets driven by pheromones into a stinging frenzy.”

Last week I shared a piece on the illusion of conscious AI, where neuroscientist Anil Seth mentioned that language is why “people wonder whether Anthropic’s Claude is conscious, but not DeepMind’s protein-folding AlphaFold.” I think that’s a profound insight to realign our understanding of some tech leaders’ dreams of god-like AI, but it also aligns with Stephenson’s thinking here, that LLMs will have different “shapes,” functions, relations to us, and that we will perceive them differently, not just as chatbots.

We’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences. Perhaps this can provide us with a framework for imagining what a future might look like in which we co-exist with AIs. […]

In the scenario I mentioned before, where humans become part of a stable but competitive ecosystem populated by intelligences of various kinds, one thing we humans must do is become fit competitors ourselves. And when the competition is in the realm of intelligence, that means preserving and advancing our own intelligence by holding at arms length seductive augmentations in order to avoid suffering the amputations that are their price. […]

If AIs are all they’re cracked up to be by their most fervent believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.

Beyond the binary

More than most articles, I’d invite you to click-through to this one by Simon Höher, where he goes beyond the binary, because he includes slick, minimal, animated, illustrations of his proposed framework. He argues that while binaries help make sense of reality, they often trap us in unproductive loops.

His framework progresses through: Affirmation, beginning with a unifying concept that rallies support but lacks nuance; Objection, the emergence of opposition and binary thinking, where concepts are framed as mutually exclusive; Integration, moving to “both-and” thinking that holds multiple values simultaneously; Negation, explicitly rejecting old categories without yet establishing new ones; and Contextualisation, developing new distinctions that account for multiple intersecting contexts.

Here, we deliberately leave the old dichotomies behind, but they never truly leave us. It is an explicit rejection of the old categories – a move away from the old, while not yet grasping the new. A liminal space, still defined by its past in the negative: post-capitalism, post-colonialism, post-modernity. […]

Here, we are forced to think and act in constellations ourselves: in networks of mutual and collective contextualisation, of pointing out each others blindspots (the contexts we didn’t know we didn’t see), of taking parts of this complexity and leaving other parts to others. […]

The goal of this type of thinking is not to erase boundaries – they’re essential for making sense of the world. Instead, it’s to make our binaries more intelligent, more permeable, more alive. To treat them as the interfaces they are and to collectively move beyond the limiting loops we keep finding ourselves in.

Using storytelling to investigate scientific questions

In this interview, Arula Ratnakar, a computational neuroscience PhD student, explains how storytelling can enhance scientific exploration, particularly through her speculative fiction piece Coda. She argues that science itself translates complex concepts into narratives, making them more accessible, and that science fiction allows for the exploration of ideas that are improbable but grounded in reality.

What I found interesting is to make a parallel with other methods. In workshops, the method used helps the participants to think differently about something they might know, like assembling an alternative future for their organisation. It’s also well known that thinking while walking or discussing an idea with someone else often leads to new insights or unlocks what looks like a dead end. Here the format of scifi does the same kind of work, using story and characters to think differently about science.

With science fiction, you can think about things that are impossible in reality, or at least very, very improbable, but try to approach them—at least in hard science fiction, which is what I write—through a rigorous approach. And I also feel like you can think about scientific concepts or even neuroscience concepts or mathematical concepts in speculative fiction and science fiction in a way that you could not possibly do without having characters and having this fictional world around them. […]

I think it helps me be a better scientist because it’s just this huge additional source of motivation for learning things and also for branching out beyond my topic of expertise. I’m not a quantum computing person at all, but this story gave me the opportunity to think about that. […]

A lot of what science is is really turning everything in our universe into a form that we can process, and a form that we can process is ultimately a story. So science is just translating everything that’s happening around us into a narrative that we can engage with.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Latent futures. “This free online event, open to all, is an invitation to consider how understanding the future as unfolding around us might equip us to contest those narratives of the future that are not adequate to our current moment.” (Via Justin Pickard, it’s also where I grabbed my header image this week.)
• Afro Futures 2050 – Reimagining Africa with sci-fi. “By 2050, Africa will be home to one in four people on Earth. Africa Futures 2050 is all about harnessing that momentum—inviting Africans to envision how the continent can look, feel, and operate in a future propelled by possibility. Rather than waiting for change, we’re empowering communities to imagine tomorrow and take practical steps to build it today.”
• Ten books for prospective futurists. “It’s time to update my list of ten books that a prospective futurist should read. The principle is the individual is starting from a tabula rasa (limited or no previous exposure). It’s hard to do, so and I cheated a little bit, by offering other suggestions and grouping them under loose categories or types.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• OpenAI unites with Jony Ive in $6.5 Billion deal to create AI devices. “The all-stock deal, which effectively unites Silicon Valley royalty, is intended to usher in what the two men call ‘a new family of products’ for the age of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is shorthand for a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence.”
• #cognitivedebt. This sloppy mistake has been widely shared but I like Willshire’s framing here. “Here’s a nice example of #cognitivedebt. The Chicago Sun times recently published a list of ‘Summer Reads 2025’. Except… eleven of the books don’t exist.”
• Will supercapacitors come to AI’s rescue?. “These coordinated spikes can strain the power grid, and the issue promises to get worse rather than better in the near future. ‘The problems that we’re trying to solve for are the language models that are probably 10 to 20 times, maybe 100 times larger’ than the ones that exist today.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes. “Branded ‘DZ’ for dingzhi, or ‘customized,’ the system invites residents to submit proposed routes through a city-run platform. Others with similar travel needs can opt in or vote, and if demand meets the threshold — typically 15 to 20 passengers per trip — the route goes live.”
• As coastline erodes, one California city considers ‘Retreat Now’. “Carlsbad, unlike many other seaside communities facing gut-wrenching decisions about how to handle coastal erosion, might just have the time, space and resources to get ahead of the problem. Plenty of advocates in the region hope the city can be a model for climate adaptation with its proposal to move the road inland.”
• Thousands of falling satellites put the atmosphere at risk. Move fast and break things, but for the planet instead of a codebase. Well done, arseholes. “Decommissioned satellites vaporize when they plunge through the atmosphere, decomposing into their elements, mostly aluminum, with some copper and lithium.”

Asides

• Giant Sequoias are taking root in an unexpected place: Detroit. “Meanwhile, experts say some native trees—including hemlock, elm and beech—are struggling in the city. In addition to the giant sequoias, Arboretum Detroit is also planting roughly 80 other species of trees in the neighborhood.” (Via Kottke.)
• Charles Brooks photographs the interiors of musical and scientific instruments (here a synchrotron). “The powerful machine serves as a circular speedway with a synchronized magnetic field, emitting high energy X-rays that allow researchers to render details at atomic and molecular levels”
• Mediterranean without borders. The fun thing here is not the missing borders, but the verticality of the map, which gives a whole new perspective on the region. (Via Manuscriptions.)