The value of preposterous futures ⊗ From the trenches of the Butlerian Jihad ⊗ The illusion of conscious AI

The second feature, a mix of three articles, kind of ran away from me length-wise. Be sure to hit reply and tell me a) if you like these longer takes b) where they should go in the newsletter (no change, moved to the end, separate email, article on the website that I just link to, etc).

The value of preposterous futures

When you click through to this article by Johannes Kleske, you’ll notice I cheated a bit, the actual title is “Highlights and provocations from the Future Days 2025 conference.” You’ll find those excellent provocations and his Instagram Reels done during the conference. But there’s also a summary of his comments during a roundtable panel with Nadim Choucair.

That’s the part that popped the article up in the featured section. I’ve shared his writing before, but the practice of critical futurism—where one deconstructs “existing future narratives—the images of the future already circulating in our society”—is one I don’t see often enough and which he explains clearly. Kleske also talks about preposterous futures, which are often ignored in scenarios and cone visuals. Instead, he says “to start with the preposterous—imagine the most radical future, the most extreme vision based on your values—and then work backward to the present.” Based on my understanding of The Futures Cone (have a read if you’ve never delved much in my futury shares), that means he mixes the radical/preposterous with the preferable.

Futures that deliberately encode friction, accountability, and renegotiation loops may prove sturdier than friction-free utopias. […]

The interesting part about “preposterous futures,” if you go back to the futures cone, is that those scenarios, which seem outrageous and impossible, make clearer what we take for granted. The problem with futures we take for granted is that we’re barely aware of how deeply ingrained they are. […]

You’ll develop entirely different action paths if you first envision the truly desired, preposterous future instead of immediately saying, “No, that’s too crazy; we need to keep it practical.” The radical vision comes first, but then it needs to be broken down: what does it actually mean for daily life? That’s when we see how radical it truly is.

Dispatch from the trenches of the Butlerian Jihad

A couple of issues ago, I shared a piece by D. Graham Burnett, Will the Humanities survive Artificial Intelligence?. I quite liked it, from my non-academic perspective where I connected it to Collective Intelligence and “alien familiars.” His essay has been doing the rounds and provoked many an answer, including the one above by ADH. And this second one I’d like to attach with the others, Benjamin Breen’s AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder.

I’m not sure I agree with Andrew, but he’s a very smart guy and he’s the one actually teaching, so I’ll have to think on his points. To overly and maybe impolitely summarise; students use AI almost despite themselves, stuck between deadlines and its availability, all the while despising the general state of technological presence and imposition in their lives. Educators should thus curtail it.

The part that made me include it here, is towards the very end, where he says that he’s “going to try something new in my classroom next fall: pen and paper. I’m going [to] ask students to keep their devices put away and work their ideas onto the page by hand.” He does that not only in response to AI, but to screens and distraction in general.

Breen on the other hand, likes the use of AI, mentioning how “generative AI elevates the value of humanistic skills,” “the newfound ability of non-technical people in the humanities to write their own code” (he gives two historical games he created as examples), and the “brutal fact that AI chatbots are significantly damaging core aspects of the educational system.”

When I originally shared Burnett’s article, I wrote:

What Burnett is saying, is that AI lets us remove what students were told they had to do. What remains is what they want to do. This might be one of the results of AI—for those who can chose, lots of employees wont have that choice—keeping what we want to do and removing what we had to, giving it to our alien familiars.

What’s emerging for me, from these various pieces and other reading, is that it’s not just pre-AI education that’s changing and it’s not students becoming uneducated dummies with diplomas. It’s not in-between either. It might be a multiplication of ways to get an education—meaning a diploma of some kind, learning for learning is already quite varied.

To paraphrase heavily and highlight the angles I see: ADH is going to offer a class where you work deeply on “classic” skills of writing and thinking; Breen is talking about teachers leveraging AI to augment their teaching; and Brunett was talking about “classic” learning followed by deep exploration using AI, with the loss of some ways of grading.

Will we eventually see the same class being offered “screenless,” fast-tracked, and as “classic” followed by discussions with custom bots? Multiple other forms? Perhaps some kind of transdisciplinary programs emerge, where you speed through topics with AI, to then meet and discuss with teachers and students? Deep degrees and in-between disciplines degrees?

Ok, this probably should have been an article, I’ll stop here and “rob you” of all quotes but one, from Breen, to keep the length half-way reasonable. Go read all three.

But in the longer run, the damage is being done to students. By making effort an optional factor in higher education rather than the whole point of it, LLMs risk producing a generation of students who have simply never experienced the feeling of focused intellectual work. Students who have never faced writer’s block are also students who have never experienced the blissful flow state that comes when you break through writer’s block. Students who have never searched fruitlessly in a library for hours are also students who, in a fundamental and distressing way, simply don’t know what a library is even for.

The illusion of conscious AI

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues that artificial consciousness is far less likely than many believe, offering three key reasons for our tendency to overestimate this possibility. First, humans assume intelligence and consciousness are inherently linked, a bias particularly triggered by language-based AI. Second, we incorrectly treat the brain as a computer when, in reality, biological brains function fundamentally differently. Third, we overlook alternative explanations for consciousness, including Seth’s research suggesting it may emerge from our nature as living organisms rather than from information processing alone. He warns that even non-conscious AI that merely seems sentient presents ethical challenges, potentially distorting our moral priorities. He advocates against deliberately attempting to create artificial consciousness.

Just because intelligence and consciousness go together in us doesn’t mean they go together in general. The assumption that they do is a reflection of our psychological biases, not an insight into reality. Language exerts a particularly strong pull on these biases, which is why people wonder whether Anthropic’s Claude is conscious, but not DeepMind’s protein-folding AlphaFold. […]

As science, technology, and medicine continue to advance, more of these scenarios will move from the fringes to the spotlight. What we need is nothing less than a satisfactory scientific understanding of consciousness itself.

§ 4chan is dead. Its toxic legacy is everywhere. “4chan’s user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy. […] Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Why futurists start with a backward glance. “The future is about identifying strategic choices that will shape the future we want to build. History reveals how communities, industries, and organizations responded to change, offering a glimpse into potential outcomes that could have a significant impact.”
• A magazine from 2046: A glimpse into possible futures. “What if our thoughts are no longer private? What if mobile phones were banned from public places? What if the elderly start committing crimes to get into the care and community of prison? Sitra’s new JOS* (What if) magazine transports readers to a future where some of today’s weak signals have become everyday realities.”
• We The Hopeful. Maybe not “futures” per se, but a great example of a simple use of vivid scenarios. “We, the hopeful, want to bridge the gap. Drawing on climate science, we created the story of Louise, living in 2050. It reflects the effects our actions will have on the next generations.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Republicans try to cram ban on AI regulation into budget reconciliation bill. Grifters be grifting. “Republicans try to use the Budget Reconciliation bill to stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years.”
• Pope Leo XIV names AI one of the reasons for his papal name. “I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”
• DolphinGemma: How AI can decipher dolphin communication. I wonder how long it takes them to ask what the heck we’re doing? “Foundational AI model trained to learn the structure of dolphin vocalizations and generate novel dolphin-like sound sequences. This approach in the quest for interspecies communication pushes the boundaries of AI and our potential connection with the marine world.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Here is everything that has changed since congestion pricing started in New York. Basically, all good except public opinion. “The Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimates that about 76,000 fewer vehicles per day in April entered Manhattan’s central business district, which encompasses the congestion zone, than probably would have without the toll. That’s the equivalent of 2.3 million fewer cars for the month, or 12 percent fewer than would have been expected given historical traffic trends.”
• Sea transport explainer. “Ships are the bloodstream of the world economy, responsible for more of the global flow of goods than all other forms of transport combined.1 In 2023, seagoing vessels, from oil tankers to container ships, carried more than 12 billion tons of goods: roughly 1.5 tons for every person on Earth.”
• MUJI MUJI 5.5 Milan. “The designers Claire Renard and Jean-Sébastien Blanc, co-founders of Studio 5•5 and recognized as pioneers of upcycling in France, have created a Manifesto House for MUJI inspired by Japanese architecture. This evolutive, creative, frugal solution contemplates the importance of serenity in the commotion of the city.”

Asides

• Bioprinting without breaking the skin. Woah! “The approach uses focused ultrasound to sculpt injected ‘bio-ink’ into tissue-like structures, opening the door to minimally invasive applications in cancer therapy, bioelectronics, and regenerative medicine.”
• Denmark’s museum objects at risk from ‘extreme’ new mould, say conservators. “Unlike most fungi, which prefer a very high humidity, and will come as a result of water damage or humid buildings, this variety prefers dry environments. Jul Bastholm’s research centred around museums, but she has also seen the mould in churches, archives and libraries. ‘It seems they [the fungi] prefer cultural heritage. I’ve never seen them anywhere else,’ she said.”
• An abandoned cabinet unearths a trove of unseen Kodachrome slides documenting 1960s San Francisco. “The images document a period of major infrastructural development in the area, including the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system and the subway beneath Market Street, in addition to quieter moments.”