Box091: Please. Stahp.

05.04.23

DS081: Trying to replicate mycelium growth (I can’t remember why now). This scene was inspired by this shot which I thought was a closeup of a swimming pool and realised halfway through was actually a shiny floor. Live and learn.

I’m really sorry it’s been so long. There’s been a succession of illness, visiting relatives, work overspill and frankly, recovery which have kept me from you. I was in Copenhagen last week for my first work trip since Covid really and certainly with the injury and I’ve absolutely ruined my back with leaning on the stick, so now at least I’m trapped in an ergonomic desk chair with this glaring tab open. PhD is progressing nicely; methodology rewritten, chapter in review. It’s a little less frenetic than earlier because I’m waiting for feedback and making tweaks. I also finally tidied up my Are.na which I’m v proud of.

Rob Horning (✝ Real Life) wrote a piece about the ‘Paralogisms of AI.’ This is a new word for me (meaning fallacious reasoning) but something I’ve been thinking about a lot – how certain rhetorical devices re-occur in drawing attention to the spectacle of AI even as they sneak to dismiss it. This is well-documented in Nordmann and Rip’s idea of ‘speculative ethics:’ (which is different to the other speculative ethics which is ‘speculative’ as in ontological rather than ‘made-up’) They talk about how discussion (either positive or negative) of speculative, future ethical problems with a technology end up distracting from the present reality of the technology as well as the current ethical dilemmas (ChatGPT might put a load of people out of work but it is currently exploiting Kenyan labourers.) Horning writes a lot about some of the rhetorical myths and plays of computation to get humans to engage with them but I really haven’t seen an argument laid out for the logical loopholes people go through in talking about AI futures other than perhaps in AI Myths.

Some of these have been explored on recent Ezra Klein’s, particularly the ‘it’s inevitable, so we must build it.’ This recent one with Kelsey Piper lays out an interesting paradox though; that this attitude is not representative of AI culture more generally. The people who don’t think this line of AI development is a good idea and worry about the dangers, aren’t building it or advocating for it. This means there’s a selection problem in what we hear from AI people about what they think the future of the technology is; those who disagree aren’t being listened to.

I also want to setup a good AI thread. Somewhere where arguably good breakthroughs and applications of the tech are documented. Time was you would just set up a Twitter bot, but I’m not sure if that’s the way to do it nowadays. Maybe a project for a quieter time.

Recent / Upcoming

I was in Copenhagen last week on my first post-Covid, post-nine-smaller-femurs trip. I was there to help open up the Designing Narratives and Evoking Change course for Danish Design Centre which ends today I think. Also did some trips to see various friends around Copenhagen including Crystal who’s installing some grass at a museum (there’s more to it than that, as with all Crystal’s work it’s Smart.) I think it was an important talk. I started looking back on the What if Our World is Their Heaven stuff and realised that all the stuff I’ve been talking about there has moved from weak signals to IRL, which required a bit of a rethink.

Upcoming, I’m doing a talk for Service Design College on design research and critical thinking tomorrow (30 March) in the morning. I think it’s free.
Going back on From Later next week but I can’t think about what to talk about. All the signals are really loud.
I’ll be in Milan for Salone April 20-22. I’m doing a panel with some friends which I don’t think has been announced yet, but lmk if you’re about and want to hang out.
I’m delivering another masterclass for Milan Poli in May with Malina Dabrowska on speculative design (yeah) and design futures.

Short Stuff

Language is our Latent Space from Jon Evans is basically a way of redescrbiing Hayles’ cognitive assemblages as all the tech people imagine they are inventing STS for the first. time.
Brilliant review of Apple’s Extrapolations and the way it completely misses the mark on how fiction should talk about climate change (“It’s the fossil fuels, stupid”)
In an extension of the logic around Lil Miquela, Levis is going to use computer generated people of colour as model.
The reading list from Stochastic Parrots day.
Ed Zitron on the deflating of expectations and delivery in Silicon Valley.
Another John Lanchester great on silicon and Silicon Valley via Natalie.
The Crypto world is still all just crime.

This post was in drafts for ages and then I accidentally clicked ‘restore backup’ out of morbid curiosity and it deleted it all so there you go, lesson learned. Ok I love you love you love you.

Box090: The Tweet that Sank $100bn

15.02.23

whiDS080: Trying to keep them quick and simple but it always means there’s something you’re unhappy with. I didn’t want to texture the ground or trees so kept them in silhouette but there’s not enough light to justify such a black/white imbalance. The ground should be somewhat illuminated to be more realistic. Oh well.

Google’s Bard was undone on day two by an inaccurate response in the demo video where it suggested that the James Webb Space Telescope would take the first images of exoplanets. This sounds like something the JWST would do but it’s not at all true. So one tweet from an astrophysicist sank Alphabet’s value by 9%. This says a lot about how a) LLMs are like* being at the pub with friends, it can say things that sound plausible and true enough and no one really needs to check because who cares? Except we do because this is science, not a lads’ night out and b) the insane speculative volatility of this AI bubble that the hype is so razor thin it can be undermined by a tweet with 44 likes.

I had a wonder if there’s any exploration of the ‘thickness’ of hype. Jack Stilgoe suggested looking at Borup et al which is evergreen but I feel like there’s something about the resilience of hype: Like crypto was/is pretty thin in the scheme of things. High levels of hype but frenetic, unstable and quick to collapse. AI has pretty consistent if pulsating hype gradually growing over the years while something like nuclear fusion is super-thick (at least in the popular imagination) – remaining through decades of not-quite-ready and grasping the slightest indication of success. I don’t know, if there’s nothing specifically on this, maybe I should write it one day.

*This week LLMs have been like bullshit generators and lossy jpegs as well. Both good stories but ChatGPT is like ChatGPT really.

PhD update

Writing this thing is really coming in waves. Sometimes I’m tearing my teeth out, sometimes I re-read something I wrote a week ago and am like ‘damn that’s good’ then I’m like ‘but is it actually relevant or useful?’ Then It’s a downer again. At the moment I’m on a roll with it, I was quietly working away on little bits here and there, looked up at the weekend and I’d basically done most of a chapter and it was… good?! And obvously that feeling is contagious so I’ve just kept on rolling on.

Consistency is definitely key. The other weekend I took four straight days off thinking I would binge it and ended up firstly, not meeting my own over-inflated expectations of what I thought I’d be able to do and then feeling a bit grim and secondly; rushing, resulting in stuff I was unhappy with and was a bit incoherent. As a result of the binge I ended up taking a break for a few days, then when I came back I couldn’t remember all the half-finished threads I meant to get back to.

So I’ve stuck with just doing two hours or so a day (occasionally more where work allows) and it’s been really productive; small, confident steps.

Upcoming

I’m going to be delivering part of the Designing Narratives and Evoking Change course being run by the Danish Design Center, March 24th-29th. They’re a lovely bunch I’ve been talking to in an Arup capacity for a while and I’m sort of interested to see how we might build as a relationship seeing as my bag is really about the social utility of design and sometimes in a big company, where quite rightly the focus is on clients, that can be hard to demonstrate the value of or find time for.

Short Stuff

Really great (and pretty scathing and hilarious) critique of Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised at MoMA. It’s interesting to see AI spectacularism and boosterism critiqued from the art world press. There’s a sort of incredible clarity to it when highlighting the superficiality of the work. I wonder if he’s read it.
Matt picked up #breezepunk and ran a little further with it. He’s right, this is how things use to happen; you sort of keep the idea snowballing and people chew it over and share. I don’t think that’s how things happen now. I think you need to convince people they can get rich or something. I seeded breezepunk with Julian and co. and I’m hoping it takes root over there.
Google Bard was released this week, weirdly I got a prediction right. There’ll be more to come as they all race to claim back the dwindling market cap for new digital products and services.*
Dan McQuillan perfectly timing ‘We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it.‘

Gosh I have so many reading tabs open but there really is no time. I don’t even really have breaks between meetings to read things. I’m failing at the thing I lobby for all the time; time for reflexivity, thought and self-driven exploration.

Malina is setting up a blog for us to talk more about Arup design work. As if you could get any more but as this place continues to focus on my personal interests and practice (through PhD mostly I guess) it would be good to have somewhere to write about Arup stuff since people always ask.

Ok I do really love you. Bye.

*You know what, this is really the biggest story of the moment. It’s going to make writing about LLMs very hard because of how hot it is right now but I’m pleased that it seems to be conforming with my expectations at least.

Box086: An Argument for Dread

14.12.2214.12.22

The predictions for next year are coming thick and fast; the trend reports and action statements. Next year will be the year we come together to solve climate change. Put it on the kanban board! I’m likely going to be in hospital in a few days for a little while more so already have an end of year post deep in drafts and am making the most of my recognisance to do little bits of reading now. For now I want to pick up this preferable futures thread…

An argument for dread

A couple of years ago I was at an event in Geneva, there to talk about something or other. Julian Oliver was up before me and as opposed to previous times where we’ve been on stage together and talked about technology and critical practice, he launched into a brutally unrelenting and damning litany detailing the state of the planet and the despair he felt – maybe a solid 90 minutes of horror. This was just as he turned his life towards climate related work and support XR with their infrastructure. The anger and despair he felt energised him to get up and use his skills to do something.

I also left that talk changed, shortly after I stopped eating meat and changed the way I consumed stuff. It’s not like I was ignorant of climate collapse before, but the sheer dread I experienced of having the near-future state of Earth laid out so clearly drove me to anger and to action and to really question and change little every day actions as well as do a lot more where I could in my work. The effect of this dread was that it made climate change less abstract and alien and more material and real.

Later, I invited Julian to come and give the same talk at any away day at the university I worked at and the same thing happened; several colleagues told me it had changed the way they lived and worked. Shortly after, when we looked at how to embed the climate emergency in teaching, people were seized with an almost zeal about it. I don’t know how much Julian’s perspective influenced that zeal but I’m sure it did in some small part – at least two folks told me so.

This is why the push back on dark futures and ‘dystopia’ makes me a little uncomfortable: Anger and outrage are powerful tools for action; it’s what the right-wing has been using for the last few years to stoke extremism and inflate their power. It’s what protest movements like XR, Just Stop Oil and Tyre Extinguishers have been using to drum up support and controversy; an intentional tactic to keep their issues at the centre of public discourse. But the last few years of design and futures discourse has seen a push back against it to be replaced with hopeful narratives and ‘preferable’ futures.

Duplicates of Voros’ original cone (left) – of which there are many – rarely feature the ‘scenario’ or ‘wildcard’ points in which specaultive practice operates as a means of providing a map of the entire space of possibility so that it can challenge assumptions and biases about the future in the present. This has meant a focus on probability and preferability in recent speculative projects.

I’m absolutely not dismissing the value of positive future imaginaries, even ‘preferable’ ones within their limited frame of reference. I agree with the thesis that negative stories can be overwhelming and paralysing, making you feel helpless. Others argue that we are already suffused with grim stories of dystopian (or dark*) futures, particularly through science fiction and that they just drive us to despair. Equally, that the things we may think of as dark futures for northern Europeans are the lived experiences of people in other parts of the world we are aestheticising for the sake of some high-minded discourse.

Remember that the point of speculative practice is not about making predictions or even defining preferable futures but in mapping out the space of possibility so that we can think critically about the choices we make today. There’s a lot of nuance here but fundamentally, if we diminish the ability to confront the ‘bad’ outcomes then we also diminish their presence in the mind of people and provide a cover for inaction in hope: A focus on the preferable future, erases, forecloses or precludes other possibilities.

The point of speculation is to bring out and materialise many futures and hold them together to navigate and negotiate them without precluding or proscribing and particular ones based on preferability.

Studies have shown that optimism and hope can lead to inaction, it even appears in historic political phenomena such as Sebastianism; the Portuguese myth of the king returning to elad the country back to some made-up greatness. A good balance may be found in the Stockdale paradox – the ability to both hope for the better as well as totally engage with the facts on the ground with no sense of escapism. But this means acknowledging, talking about and describing the potential grimness of things to come to make different choices today.

As Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams wrote ‘You can’t resist new worlds into being.‘ Where left-wing/liberal/green protest movement can be very good at identifying, targeting and challenging the object of antagonism through a dark vision of what is to come, they aren’t very good at proposing what comes next; what does the world where XR win actually look like? What’s the pay-off? Yes, it would be ‘better’ but how? It is arguable (and is regrettably, compellingly argued), that the world right now is pretty good if, for instance, you’re a wealthy human being in a European capital. The conservatives are very good at this because the world they want to build is the world of recent fictional nostalgia; where you didn’t have to worry about immigration, or climate change, or gender, or sexuality, or new drugs, or fat cat financiers, or the cost of living. It’s a world in which you get exactly what you want and you live worry free. That’s a compelling sell as preferable futures go: Q is a preferable futures project; Brexit is a preferable futures project.

I refer back to Occupy a lot, it was – before being torn apart by infighting – the smartest and most brilliant protest movement. It very clearly identified what it was angry about through Graeber’s brilliant slogan ‘We are the 99%’, it proposed the solution – deliberative democracy – and made it real by bringing it into practice at the actual Occupy sites. It was a movement motivated by fury that used that fury to bring a new world into being.

*I think about ‘dystopia’ as a an absolute category; it’s not meant to be read as anything but fantasy while ‘dark’ futures are at least plausible. Monika’s work on Protopia futures is critical here because it dismantles the whole hated utopia/dystopia division in the first place. (I think we can, as a whole, dismiss utopias and dystopias as co-dependent fantasises that only work as a form of escapism.)

Short Stuff

Last week, Stackoverflow had to stop taking answers from ChatGPT following responses flooding the platform. The answers can look really plausible but are often incorrect. It exposes a problem with these types of services that can easily fall prey to large language models (LLMs) and straight away made me imagine a future of roving LLMs holding websites hostage in exchange for training data. I think this is really interesting signal which indicates a new form of interaction or attack. Similar to how everyone was unprepared for DDOS’ a few years ago. Content bombing.
Or ‘fiction as malware‘ for disabling/revealing AI systems.
David Karpf celebrates a sign that Apple might be returning to realising that people just want things that improve their lives, not abstract techno-fantasies.
Nuclear fusion breakthrough. (Since I put this here, it went from interesting to small announcement to FUSION IS COMING! on every news channel to ‘no it isn’t’ again in a few hours. Interesting to compare it to block chain coverage because, you know, it’s actually useful.)
More on the failure of voice assistants.

Ok, love you very much as well you know.