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

  • Do We Already Think AIs Are Conscious?

    When an AI Agent wrote a hit piece about a human, the press paid attention. But they didn’t look at the user comments. Here’s what they missed. When it comes to AI, my writerly beat is how human behavior changes in the face of AI. While I am interested in existential questions around AI, I’m…

  • Wonder Moments

    When something makes you notice and appreciate the technological marvels that we all take for granted, pay attention. Last Wednesday, my first meeting was a Zoom with one person in Warsaw (6,000 miles away) and another in Palo Alto (a mere 350 miles away). I’m in Los Angeles visiting family. I have global meetings like…

  • Interpersonalization

    Does the marketing dream of AI-generated ads for every person make sense? Digital advertising uses all the data it has about you (which is a lot) to draw conclusions about the things you want and then place ads about those things in front of you. My friend (and media deep thinker) Jim Meskauskas describes the worst-case scenario…

  • Thought Flavors

    Different tools can unleash different kinds of thinking, including fountain pens (a recent interest). Lately, I’ve gotten into fountain pens. A couple years back, my friend Rob gave me a nice Pilot. Then, after they went to Paris on a long-delayed mother/daughter trip, Kathi and Helena brought back a Waterman for me. I had an…

  • Will Teach for Food: a Mini Memoir

    Today’s job market for recent college grads eerily resembles the academic job market in the 1990s: what are the lessons? The great graduate job drought, a dejecting article by Anjli Raval from the Financial Times ($) arrested my attention this week. Recent college graduates face long and difficult job searches. In the U.K., there are 140 applicants…

  • Leaps of Faith (but not that kind)

    How can we escape closed-loop thinking? (Hint: it’s not logic.) La Profesora turned me onto a recent episode of Your Undivided Attention, a podcast by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of The Center for Humane Technology. In “What Would It Take to Actually Trust Each Other? The Game Theory Dilemma,” Harris and Raskin talk with Professor…

  • Shakespeare and the Attacks on Venezuela

    Recent political events resemble a moment from “King Henry IV, Part Two.”  I am an apex nerd. My passions include science fiction, comic books, fountain pens (a fresh rabbit hole into which I’ve faaaaallen) and comedy. As a researcher, I examine how our behavior changes, and doesn’t change, in the face of new technologies, most…

  • My 2025 in Books

    My annual journey across the books I read over the year. If you’re looking for a good read (or books to avoid) then you’ve come to the right place! Happy New Year! Note: Since this week’s issue is longer than most, your email might truncate it, particularly if you use gmail. At the truncation, just click…

  • Do We REALLY Need More Storytellers?

    Corporations are creating storyteller positions, but can this work? A December 12th story in the Wall Street Journal ($)—”Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’: Brands trying to wrest greater control of their narratives are asking for ‘storytelling’ skill sets—without a campfire in sight” by Katie Deighton—sparked a brief blaze of enthusiastic agreement on my LinkedIn feed. Although this seems like…

  • The AI Lies We Tell Ourselves

    We have to get real about when human skills are better than AI… and if anybody cares. I’m reluctant to loan out nonfiction books because I fill my books with marginalia arguments with authors. I worry that if people read these marked up books they’ll think I’ve slipped a cog. The same worry overtakes me…