This page showcases tools and discussions for utilizing computer-generated and mediated intelligence.
For over 70 years people have been working on AI systems, or machine learning or computer generated intelligence. Much like how the touchscreen existed before the iPhone, we are currently witnessing a emergence into the hand of regular people of AI systems that can replace and/or augment human intelligence. There are implications across all cultural and knowledge work.
Synthetic imagery and text on demand, multi source summary search, asking questions of books, and more are now available to anyone with a basic computer and the internet.
For background, I work as a XR (Augmented & Virtual Reality) Interaction Designer at a company called
which uses XR as a tool for scientists in design molecular and protein structures for use in therapeutics. The scientists we work with are in an ongoing movement of embracing computational chemistry to generate plausible ideas using machine learning to open up whole new frontiers and iterate faster. And as a product team, my colleagues and I increasingly utilize the more commercially available productivity and visual software for myriad tasks, and are always experimenting how to augment ourselves more.
The mismatch between what students learn in school and the skills required in the working world could grow if students don’t learn how to use these tools and work with similar tools, which many employers are implementing now and will likely be common place when students enter working world. Even the dinosaurs want to alleviate the managerial bloat of being bureaucracies! Entrepreneurship for certain is already undergoing a shift in providing more leverage for founders.
New inequality could emerge of people who are very skilled at using the leverage available through AI systems vs those who are not utilizing the systems or using them in an untrained way. Or even being used by other people leveraging AI systems, for well before the ghost in the machine develops a volition people are already using these tools with selfish and even malicious goals. While still others are using systems to bring forth new possibilities for love and freedom. The future is inherently unwritten, yet as with the coming of writing before we now have paper which can dance back. Conversing with the medium is what ‘computers’ are all about, so what conversations will we know how to have?
This is a prime era to learn and install synthetic media literacy because the flaws are still evident and the tools are still emerging. This will mature quickly, and powerful tools without wise wielders will seldom bring ideal prospects.
The lesson plan of the future perhaps becomes - inquire, verify sources, remix, refine questions, grow, repeat
Students will need to foster imagination of their own and continue creating art lest we as a society start sinking into a saccharine pool of stale reflected preferences from when an AI model was first made. And Teachers consider how you could better be supported and augmented in educating the future.
To call all of this ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is irrelevant, the seeds that were planted are now bearing fruit: it is possible to use computers for science fiction things now, so what will we make and who will be involved?
The AI was us all along, a mirror indeed, yet more like a ‘dreamcatcher for knowledge’.
Below is a collection of resources that I add to as I find more. Actually tracking this explosion of tools, methods and perspectives will likely require this coda page to become an AI, which is just in time for their alpha ;)