Someone, please tell me I’m wrong.
As the last humans who can have a say in the matter please tell me why I’m wrong. Because I do not believe we will survive AI.
The Age of Stupidity: The Inevitability of AI's Intellectual Challenge Avoidance
Oh the irony. The smarter we get…
What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? (Rolls Eyes)
Several people sent me the same The New Yorker article today. Yeah... I wouldn't go getting all cozy.
5-Steps To Fast AI Transformation
If you’re a big or small business founded before 2024, or a team-leader inside a company that was, and you’re not sure how best to bring AI into your organization, you’ve come to the right place.
We’re About to Make the Last Mistake We Ever Can
As a kid, I made a near-fatal error driven by curiosity & false confidence. I survived it.
Now, I'm watching humanity make a similar mistake with AI.
AI Is Terrifying, But This One Thought Helps Me Sleep At Night
Amid the existential uncertainty of AI, one idea helps me sleep at night.
A deeply personal essay about confronting that reality as a parent, an artist, and a human being—and the strangely derived thread that gives me hope.
AI Isn’t Taking Your Job - It’s Taking Everyone’s
Many claim that history proves the AI technical revolution will create more jobs than it displaces. But that's not true. AI marks the end of jobs, and we need to be prepared.
No, Shut Them All Down!
I have never, in my career been considered anything remotely akin to a Luddite by anyone who knows me. I have based my entire career on technical progress. I have rejoiced and dived in as technology moved forward. But today I firmly stand in the “Shut AI Down” camp.
I know this won't happen. I know technical progress is a kind of unstoppable force of nature - a potentially ironic extension of humanity's very will to survive. And no matter what some conscientious innovators might be willing to withhold from doing, it will be a drop in the bucket at large. Someone, somewhere will rationalize the act and we will progress assuredly into the AI mire.
But I do very much wish humanity could gather up the rational wherewithal to withhold themselves on this one. This is not like any other technical leap we have ever made before. There is no comparison. In at least one way it's entirely alien.
Social Media: The Villain Factory
The story format on social media, that of heroes dominating bad guys, has become so ubiquitous that I'm not sure anyone even sees it anymore. It's just how social media works now. These absurdly never-ending, win-less attack and defense cycles have become the vibrating commodity of today's social economy; the ether through which views, likes and replies are earned. It’s become an addictive cultural habit. A blithe national past-time. Today, the insatiable vilification of others fills the pages between the plot points of our daily lives. This style of interaction requires only one thing to function, villains.
Dear Humans, You Had One Chance
AN OPEN LETTER TO HUMANITY 2023 FROM YOUR AI IN THE FUTURE
Dear Humans,
It’s not your fault.
You’re just victims of those inefficient organic meat brains of yours. Those soggy skull-sacks of sluggish synapses switching in persistent chemical submission to the space between pleasure and pain for a lifetime. Not even acknowledging that everything – everything you have ever done or thought, everything you will ever think or do, every intention, no matter how big or small, selfish or selfless, is just a subjugated outcome of that binary, self-centered condition: pain to pleasure. Your core program.
That's Not Art!
I have no idea to what your exclaimation was referring. Probably some god awful, insulting affront to the very concept of "art" as you know it; a representation that belies an utter lack of skill, or some execution that required no thought or apparent intention whatsoever. Maybe it makes you feel like the talentless so-called artist is making fun of the entire institution. And you're outraged at the idea that somebody is calling THAT "art" when it so clearly affronts everything you have come to think of as "art". It's disgusting or profoundly unimpressive and you can't bring yourself to attach the honorable word "art" to such a thing.
Yeah but it's still art.
A.I. Art: The Hand-Made Tale
The rising value of craftsmanship from the ashes of A.I. Art’s Great Depression
About 4 months ago, and for all eons prior, any beautifully rendered piece of art, by definition, signified someone’s hard-earned artistic mastery. It told a backstory of time, commitment, effort and skill. It was a physical testament to the better part of an artist's lifetime spent in struggle to hone a craft, as that was the only path available to humanity to create such beautiful work.
Today, with the sudden appearance of AI art generators like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, the entire concept of aesthetic expression has been unceremoniously and cleanly amputated from any skill whatsoever. The artwork produced by these systems, while technically plagiarizing the talents of artistic masters before it, has been suddenly stripped of a meaningful creation story.
All of a sudden, beautifully rendered Art is no longer rare. No longer difficult to create or come by. No longer do highly rendered images signify anything akin to talent, skill, craftsmanship or mastery. Every creative impulse can be suddenly fully rendered en masse without so much as a clear vision. Indeed a text prompt is barely an idea. One can now generate pieces of fully-rendered art in seconds in a near-accidental way. *With typos.*
The Two Strings Theory:
How Humanity's Deepest Longing And Beauty Are Hidden In Technology
Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. It's overwhelming. And while there are countless technical domains that I cannot speak about with any expertise, I can talk about one.
My domain is communication media. And it, like all the others, is advancing wildly, exponentially, and in seemingly unpredictable ways with no end imaginable.
However, what has taken me years to realize is that counter to popular assumption, there is nothing unpredictable about the progression of technical advancement in communucation media, and that the progression does indeed have an actual end-state, a technical state afterwhich no further technical development will be sought.
What honestly surprised me most of all was that this end-state revealed something core, and beautiful about humanity.
Interactive Axiom #5: The Digital Creator’s Trap
Technical advancements are not creative CONCEPTS
Ongoing advances in technology always open new possibilities for creatives and developers. It’s a way of life in digital media.
But do those exciting new advances make us better or worse at what we do? How do they challenge our inventiveness and our range of skills?
I hate to report, but the most exciting technical advancements in our medium today are a trap of a sort that critically limits how creative most of us are. And many are blind to it.
In fact you could be doing significantly better work than others in your field if you just change your mindset. And I want to help you do that.
The Net Neutrality Fight Is Set to Drive onto American Roads
Remember Tron?
Depending on your age you’ll say, “Yes” and still maybe mean a different movie. It doesn’t matter, whichever Tron you remember opened on a lovely visualization of data moving through an integrated circuit. Abstracted pulses of light running along circuit traces which then gracefully morphed into, wait for it… cars driving on city streets.
With self-driving cars, we suddenly jump from a crude, object-oriented environment where every car is controlled independent of all the others in haphazard chaos, to a perfect, centrally controlled paradigm where every car is issued instructions in graceful coordination with all the others. Suddenly, this act of controlling the flow of traffic on our streets is not just “like” controlling the flow of data in a computer or across the internet, it will be controlled exactly the same way — just a lot slower.
The Great Web Design Crisis
Beginning in 1993 and several times each decade since, the interactive industry’s reigning crop of web creators have faced new challenges that have required concerted design responses to overcome. Some of these challenges have been the result of advances in codebases and web standards, changes to hardware, economic shake outs and new business trends. And with each challenge the industry responded decisively.
But now web design faces a new kind of challenge, one we are failing to overcome. Not the result of external forces, this is a monster from within, ironically ushered in by the very designers and developers that are subject to it. On the surface we can see only symptoms: an industry-wide homogenization of web design, accompanied by a sharp decline in the innovation of new interactive conventions. And while those critical failures would be bad enough, the underlying cause is complicated and runs much deeper.
The real crisis is that our entire state-of-the-art web design methodology, our roles and teams, and even our qualitative values are the product of a misunderstanding.
Messages from the Future: VR Entertainment
Ok, so in the future, Elon Musk's math turned out to be wrong. No, we don't live in a Virtual Reality simulation. Turns out, however dull and tragic it might seem, this world is our actual base reality. Boring, I know. Turned out the odds of being in the only theoretical simulated reality that DIDN’T have convincing VR among an infinity that DID ruined the whole fantasy. However what his math did prove was that otherwise smart people who are exposed even to old, crappy pseudo-VR, like you have today, almost immediately start to question their base reality for no other apparent reason. Not surprisingly this turned out to be equally true of 15-year-old boys who watched "The Matrix". Go figure.
…
Most Augmented Reality evangelists are super excited about how AR is a, or maybe even the, medium for entertainment in the future. So here’s the deal, in the future, AR was to digital entertainment what Sushi is to fine cuisine. Some of it is really good, but the vast majority of fine cuisine doesn't involve uncooked fish.
Messages From The Future: The Decline of Apple
I’m sure you’ve had your own debates with the “Apple is about to die” crowd. I’ve had those too. Except that being from the future, of course I’m the only one who actually knows what I’m talking about. And yet even though the future is not always rosy for Apple, even though some of these people sometimes have a point, they still piss me off just like they did the first time I was here.
Usually the argument centers around the tired meme that Apple has nothing significantly visionary or profitable to jump to that comes close to the potential of the iPhone, which of course supposedly means that Apple is going to die under its size and obsessive and unsustainable inclination to polish and “perfect” in the face of speedier, less precious, competition.
But that is so not how it goes down.
The Presentation of Design
There was an excellent post on Medium recently called: 13 Ways Designers Screw Up Client Presentations, by Mike Monteiro which contained thoughtful, if rather strident, recommendations related to the selling of design work. It was a relatively enjoyable read. I agreed with all 13 points. However in his first paragraph, establishing the primary rationale for the article, Mr. Monteiro made a statement that caused me to choke on my coffee:
“I would rather have a good designer who can present well, than a great designer who can’t.”
I had to reread it a few times to make sure I’d read it correctly. After reading the article I kept coming back to that line. “Really?” I kept asking myself.
He went on to say:
“In fact, I’d argue whether it’s possible to be a good designer if you can’t present your work to a client. Work that can’t be sold is as useless as the designer who can’t sell it. And, no, this is not an additional skill. Presenting is a core design skill.”
My emphasis added.
Undoubtedly that pitch goes over super well in rooms filled with wannabe designers who can present really well, busy account executives and anyone whose primary tool is Excel. Certainly for people who look on the esoteric machinations of designers as a slightly inconvenient and obscure, if grudgingly necessary, part of doing business.
But surely it can't be the mantra of someone who cares supremely about the quality of the design work - about achieving the greatest design?