BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • Police Drones versus the Unhoused 

    MIT Technology Review’s daily email newsletter surfaced this older story from February of 2023 this morning, which was a good thing. I’m always interested in colliding trends and stories that gather additional context when placed together.  In this case, the article concerns the way that police in Chula Vista, California—as well as across the nation—are…

  • Mr. Hyde’s Letter, a Microfiction

    What happens when a man takes medication to change his personality, but the new personality has his own opinions? Timothy’s constipated mind pushed to slow, thick wakefulness. Only a wail from his bladder stopped him from plummeting back to sleep. He felt his way to the toilet and sat, too groggy to aim. A long…

  • Serendipity Engines

    In commerce, there’s an incalculable difference between search and discovery. Discovery requires serendipity, and there’s no better source of serendipity than independent bookstores. Wednesday, I was in Eugene, a small Oregon city a couple hours south of Portland. I dropped into the legendary Smith Family Bookstore, where I found a $4.00 copy of Violent Spring by Gary Phillips,…

  • We Need New AI Analogies

    Tomorrow’s AIs are both more embodied than HAL from 2001 and less robotic than Rosie or Data. A better analogy comes from a surprisingly old story. Typically, in science fiction and popular understanding, AIs and robots (or drones) fall into distinct, although overlapping, categories. Robots are autonomous single entities that move through the physical world…

  • Chatting with Chat

    Access to ChatGPT’s new voice interface turned into a long conversation while I walked in the summer sun. The results were mixed. To paraphrase and tweak a famous quote usually attributed to H.L. Mencken, nobody has ever lost money by overestimating the laziness of the human mind. To put it more generously, we humans have a lot…

  • 13 Ways of Looking at Brands

    Brands have different functions in our lives, some easy to understand and some that deserve extra pondering. A few days ago, my friend Om Malik reached out with these questions about brands: I am thinking about something and wanted to get a better idea of what it means to be a music artist or a media company…

  • Democratizing Digital Deception

    Will bad actors use digital duplicates of our dead loved ones against us? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called “Hacking the Dead” about Trix, a corporate spy who influences the digital duplicate of an equity analyst’s beloved dead mother in order to change his mind…

  • Hacking the Dead, a Microfiction

    When a company planning an IPO wants to influence a skeptical analyst, they go about it in a sneaky way that involves Generative AI. I’ve been experimenting with microfictions, short SF stories (1,000 words or less) that help me explore and illustrate aspects of how our lives might evolve within digital transformation. Here, then, is another…

  • The Ghosts of What Wasn’t

    A recent Economist article about dying small towns inspired me to think about Retro Futures, the failed promise of the hyperloop, and “sideshadows.” Typically, when I’ve written about retro futures, I’ve explored how old science fiction stories illuminate things happening today. This time, I’ll take a different angle. One of the problems with being a futurist…

  • Who Am I This Time?

    New developments in Generative AI promise that we’ll all have digital BFFs to help us live our best lives, but is this really possible?  Last week, I read an intriguing Psychology Today piece about the next wave of Generative AI powered digital assistants. In “The Emergence of Private LLMs,” John Nosta argues: The role of Large Language…