Category: Behavior

  • Do We Care What Is Real?

    Beyond being able to tell what is real and what is AI-generated, how important is that ability to us? In my last post, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short story called Best Laid Plans about Piers Elder, a man who tries to unite people by inventing a common enemy, only to suffer unexpected…

  • Best Laid Plans, a Microfiction

    What happens when somebody invents an enemy nation?  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 the technology transformations happening all around us. Here, then, is another microfiction, “Best Laid Plans.” Next time, I’ll dig into how realistic…

  • Is AI Slop Good for Brick and Mortar?

    Will untrustworthy AI products and advertising breathe new life into retail because that’s where trustable humans are?  It was spring. I walked the streets of New Delhi reckoning with an urgent Number Two and no place to deposit it. Public toilets, at least in that hood, seemed not a high municipal priority. Then, through gastrointestinal-distress-blurred…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Face: The Final Frontier

    A decade after Google Glass, are smart glasses finally becoming a thing? Although we’ve all had our individual journeys with the internet, the journey of the internet itself has been one of increasing intimacy. At first, we had to go somewhere else to get online: to a lab somewhere at a business or university. Then…