20251221
What if the questions were instead: What kinds of labor markets are being designed around AI? What is shaping the choices about adoption? Who has bargaining power in those decisions? How will the value created by as yet unfounded promises of productivity growth be distributed? Who has power and how is it wielded to promote certain interests and negate other futures? […] When human inquiry and creativity are offloaded to anthropomorphic AI bots, there is a risk of devaluing critical thinking while promoting cognitive offloading. If we turn the intellectual development of the next generation over to opaque, probabilistic engines trained on a slurry of scraped content, with little transparency and even less accountability, we are not enhancing education; we are commodifying it, corporatizing it, and replacing pedagogy with productivity. […] Should we be luddites.
People: More diapers sales for elderly than kids. Mental models of risks. Rent a cyber friend. Butt breathing. Poverty and cognitive performance. Sloppers. Dollar stores overcharging. Units of knowledge.
Business: Intelligence doesn’t go as fast as AI. Lenders and alternative data.
Planet: When animals clone other species. Room temperature ice. Shingle street shell line. Jakarta' becomes the largest city.
Futures: 2026 report and signals. And AXA’s (PDF). Forum for the future’s sustainability (PDF). Mundane. Futurism and archivism.
Tech: Weight and offshore working. Weird innovations to save lives. Satellites leaking data. Strong biodegradable plastic. New factories (and some more). Computers metaphors to speak to a computer.
AI: Weird leaks. The Pivot. Refusing AI in writing studies.
How to use AI (Tertulia).
Useful idiots of AI doomsaying.Rabbit hole: Consumption as identity. More friction. And scarcity.
The Fickle Currency of Connection
Under the perpetual drizzle of Shingle Street, where the lanterns flickered with the stubbornness of a cockroach in a nuclear blast, 34-year-old Roy Zerner pondered his life choices while waiting for a flying scooter he’d summoned via a very popular yet highly criticized app known as “ScootMe.”* The app had a reputation for associating with the ‘sloppers,’ those peculiar folk who relied almost exclusively on AI to navigate their lives—a title Roy wore like a neon peacock feather.
Roy wasn’t alone in his reliance; the town felt compounded by a growing distrust of traditional institutions. Brands had morphed into moral arbiters, so much so that his Chipotle bowl seemed to carry more existential weight than the ten books collecting dust on his shelf. Why read when he could consume narratives via a burrito, right? It was all a part of the symbolic economy, where every chip was a story, and every guacamole scoop a statement of personal values. His fellow townsfolk were more adept at performance art than perusing page turns—after all, the fast-food metaphor was far less taxing than rigorous thought.
It was here, in the saturated backdrop of seaside ennui, where his coworker Mae had a bright idea: “Let’s make our own AI!” The plan was half-baked—the recipe called for a blend of bamboo cellulose (great news for sustainability but poor for culinary skills), and the hope was to create a ‘GenAI’ capable of producing insights that didn’t dribble into Google Search by accident like Roy’s breakfast smoothie. The irony of addressing AI’s cavalier attitude toward privacy while drafting an AI of their own was lost on no one, particularly not when the recent *AI Superintelligence Conference* deemed the possibility of world domination as “overrated” (and so remarkably well put that Roy almost forgot to roll his eyes).
Meanwhile, in an effort to combat the ‘slopper pandemic,’ Mae had embarked on an extensive campaign to encourage the town’s dwindling populace t## Navigating the Quagmire of Modernity
As dawn broke over Shingle Street, the sun shone through the mist like a shy debutante at a ball, illuminating the historical Martello tower standing sentinel. Outside the crumbling façade of what was once a fishermen’s market, Greta rifled through the aisles of a Family Dollar, her heart fluttering with concern. She was a newcomer, having fled the unfriendly humidity of her previous home city, only to find herself navigating the quagmire of modern conveniences and the absurdities of low-cost living. A questionable can of peas caught her eye – it had a price tag, but as her bulging bag of coins testified, these days were often fraught with *price* discrepancies she’d only recently learned to parse.
“Twenty-three percent more!” she mumbled, recalling the report about how nearly one in four items scanned at dollar stores could run you dry without so much as a peek at the fine print. *Oh, sweet irony! Is this a symbolic economy or a symbolic calamity?* she thought, only half-seriously.
Meanwhile, her phone buzzed, tapping into her attention like a tech-savvy mosquito, drawing her away from the peas toward the chirps and quips of AI-powered ‘sloppers’ who seemed to lose themselves in endless online nebulas. Hadn’t she just seen a TikTok of someone declaring AI their *cyber soulmate*? She chuckled, but worry lingered—what costs would the over-reliance on those artificial friendships exact from one’s mental faculties? At least her cyber chats with her friend Rankin weren’t as poisonous as that potentially eavesdropped satellite data floating overhead.
After selecting an outrageously priced candle that smelled suspiciously like betrayal, she exited the store, her head spinning with thoughts of XXIce, an icy phase her cousin’s research in material science had recently celebrated. “Ice from room temperature? Just think of the Antarctic cocktail parties!” she mused as she breathed in the salty air.
“Time for a detox,” she announced resolutely. Greta decided to ditch the mall and explore the *newest* health trend: organic bamboo platters. The colors shined brighter, promising sustainability far beyond the reach of her family’s old school plastic plates. Perhaps buying better in a time of scarcity was a sign of turning things around—because who needs more stress when choosing the right biodegradable isn’t so easy anyway?
Just behind the old Martello tower, oversized robots from the futuristic farming collective hummed away as they labored to maintain the dwindling crops. Their metallic arms, pruned and honed from human observation, danced gracefully under the supervision of tech that felt both comforting and dystopian. Would one of these robos soon dominate the job market for good, relegating humans to intermittent workers at best?
But in her brief moment of democratic reflection, she recalled Eliezer’s dire warnings, swapped mylar and generator electricity fears for giggles with ants conducting *xenoparity*. “Maybe life finds a way,” she thought, admiring a field of ants marching to their own tune. Here, in Shingle Street, surrounded by the echoes of its storied past, she felt the weight of decisions, influences from every brand, historical glimpse, and modern innovation swirling around her like a sudden storm.
Greta eventually cracked a smile, reminding herself that behind every bizarre trend, every ironic twist, lay the heart of resilience—a truth woven through time. Awareness blossomed in local experiences that thrived in real conversations, alongside aisle-dodging bike rides on her flying scooter. *Friction may indeed be a feature,* she mused, strolling away from the dollar chains, towards serendipitous moments that breathed life into a thinning tapestry. The wind whipped around her playfully. “All in all,” she chuckled, “I could use a human touch… or a well-encoded message from a friendly robot.” One could never truly tell with the madness swirling in her new adoptive hometown.