The anticyclonic gloom has passed! I really loved the anticyclonic gloom. I loved the words and I loved the ways it evoked the idea of being in Silent Hill (the original). It may not surprise you to know that the fog in Silent Hill was a technical convenience to reduce render distance so the PlayStation could handle the map. I will miss the anticyclonic gloom.

Slipping a Disk

And if you do play games, (or do renderings) have you ever had that thing where a character or object just glitches and starts spinning around wildly and incomprehensibly? I feel like that’s what hype does to the futures cone. When big, blustery and implausible claims about how a technology is going to solve climate change or cure all social ills is made, you’e briefly forced to shake up the cone in order to even consider and dispel them.

Promissory rhetorics and big speculative assertions about future benefits are, after all possible. It’s possible that we might one day live in a socioeconomic utopia brought about by generative AI but it’s not plausible. But when we’re told that this technology will usher in an age of amazing prosperity, that speculative cone is sort of shaken up and for a brief moment the possible but implausible slips into the frame of the plausible.

You’re forced to imagine this future if only to discredit it but in doing so temporarily move it into the domain of credibility so that you can expose it.

Squirrels

Ok, here’s an analogy I might run with the kid: So let’s say we both know about squirrels but I basically only know things from cursory observation and general understanding of rodents.

And let’s say she says to me one day; ‘Squirrels have six legs.’ and I say, ‘No they don’t’ and she says; ‘Yes they do’ and I say, ‘Based on my experience so far with squirrels and my understanding of mammals, it’s just implausible that squirrels have six legs. There might be one with six legs but squirrels, as a rule, do not have six legs.’

‘But they do,’ she insists ‘the ones you’ve seen just happen to have four legs.’ So I go out and spend a day looking at squirrels, hunting for even one example of an elusive six-legged squirrel.

Of course I don’t find one, but by engaging in this activity I’ve given credibility to the idea that there might be one or even that I’m just extraordinarily lucky in only having seen the incredibly rare four-legged squirrel my entire life and what’s more have just spent a bunch of time thinking and talking about squirrels. So just replace squirrels with AI, the four-legged one being the usual annoying, disappointing but sort of charming squirrel/AI and the six-legged squirrel being this childish fantasy that the kid (multi billion dollar technology company) is absolutely adamant is real and what’s more, you’re the only one who doesn’t see it.

The effect of this all is incredibly disorienting. If you’re constantly having to flex and reorient just to comprehend ludicrous claims how can anyone have time or clarity to focus on the actual? So hype, as much as a mechanism to inflate expectations and drive attention is also a sort of psyop that can undermine more general credibility of futures. It makes the whole structure of the cone (if it’s still the appropriate metaphor) unstable and unreliable, not because it’s been provably broken (e.g. the implausible turns out to actually be possible) but because you’re constantly having to refresh it to entertain and integrate ludicrous claims.

I guess it’s a similar phenomena to the idea that as the world is flooded with more and more misinformation and synthetic data, the credibility of everything is undermined and people start to question things even labelled as ‘real.‘ If enough VCs have told you that they’re going to end homelessness using their app, when one comes along that might actually do that, you’re disinclined to believe it. You’ve increasingly tightened your cone and ossified it around four-legged squirrels so much that when a six-legged one does come across your view, it must be a trick.

PhD

We’re motoring along again. Today, obviously, as I’m writing this I am not doing it because I am also trying to get back to blogging since approximately five or six people have asked ‘what’s going on there?’ Next week I might write up how I’m using Obsidian. I’m a few weeks off having a definitive sense of the next chapter (enough to share with you anyway.) I’m currently back-filling; so taking the (now) 20,000 words of unstructured notes in a massive document in scrivener and filing and shooting them away into different corners of Obsidian and watching, quite beautifully and remarkably, a structure and narrative naturally emerge.

Recents

• Julian and I wrote a chapter for the Practice of Futurecasting which is the product of a few days spent in the mountains of Austria last spring. We wrote a chapter about taking imagination seriously and how that can be done in a ‘business’ setting.
• If you’re in London next Friday I’m taking part in a panel with some incredibly luminary folks called for ‘Design Declares.‘ I think the focus is a little more on the overlap between futures and sustainability and how we can bring them all together.

Reading

Now I’m back in PhD flow, it is all just PhD stuff I’m afraid. Not as much random articles. The newsletter backlist is piling up again (I’d got it down to about 140 week before last, it’s back up at 250 ish today.)

• Why is Retraction Watch so good? Like rubber necking a bad science car crash.
• A lot of the assumptions about scaling in generative AI are off according to AI scaling myths. The AI Snake Oil folks don’t so much questions the efficacy of scaling (in this piece) but the fact of it. The assumption that data and power are just out there ready to be used (for instance, yes, there’s a gajillion terabytes of YouTube but a lot of it has no words in it.)
• The best critical mass ever?
• Absolutely wonderful, wonderful, gorgeous, gorgeous writing from Tim Maughan in Not My Problem. It has the same sort of feeling as The Deluge (which I’m still shook by) in that things don’t just go dystopia, it’s just a future of piling on inconvenience and hypocrisy in the name of speculative utopias. Dispondo-futuro? Something like that. What would a cynics (in the classical sense) futurism be called? Cynicofuturism maybe. Anyway, it’s gorgeous and i love him.

Listening

Sometimes I do this dance walking into the office to feel good. Because I love you. Speak to you later.