Transmission #46: AI Centaurs, Reading All The TIME, and the End of Social Media?
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
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Design
Author’s note
Robin Sloan
The always interesting sci-fi author Robin Sloan teams up with an AI to start writing stories:
I am done, personally, with the genre of “I see what you did there”—of making things that are noteworthy primarily for their application of a frothy new technology… I felt committed to writing a story that could stand on its own… a story to which the response might be, not “I see what you did there”, but: “I loved this!”
The full story is here. It’s great.
Ideas
The Age of Social Media Is Ending
Ian Bogost, The Atlantic
The Facebook app empire is in terminal decline, so much so that Zuckerberg is spending something in the order of $15b a year trying to pivot the business. Twitter is, of course, in a hilarious and dire predicament. Tiktok is the app du jour. But is it really social media? Bogost argues that “you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm” than connect with people like we did on FB or Insta.
And so, Bogost opines, social media is dying. We are reverting to a world of creators and consumers, something like a more democratised version of TV. And that with that, we may leave behind the intense narcissism and corrosion of the public sphere that characterised the social media age.
There may be some truth to this, but to me it feels more like we’re just witnessing an evolution of form, like rock ‘n’ roll giving way to disco. In the end, the same dopamine-mining interactions will continue to thrive as long as the incentives and economics stay the same. The article feels more like a wish and a prayer.
”We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.”
The TIME Project
Scott Krisiloff
When life feels like lurching, churning, perpetual crisis, a little perspective might be in order. Scott Krisiloff did exactly this, and decided to take the long view on human affairs – he read every issue of TIME magazine: 4,000 issues and 77 years worth of history. What can one learn from reliving history in this way? Read on for a few pithy bites of wisdom, including this nugget:
Over the short term policy matters. Over the long term science matters. In 1999 TIME named Albert Einstein the Person of the Century. It was the perfect choice. The three finalists for the honor were Roosevelt, Gandhi and Einstein, but the magazine ultimately chose Einstein because in the end “politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity.” In the short term government has the greatest impact on economic cycles, but over the long term science and technology define the productivity and standard of living of humanity.
Chart of the Week
Other
🦠 We don’t know exactly how the human microbiome will stand up over long-term space travel, but we’ve got a gut feeling. Boom-tish! Link
Apart from that zinger, it’s a quiet one this week. See you back next time for a bit more to chew on!