Week 18 / 2024

This is not only the first #weeknotes post on Worldbuilding Agency, but the first post, period.

That means there's no precedent for the format yet. Beyond having decided that a weeknotes practice would be both appropriate and beneficial for this site—which bills itself as the online research journal of Magrathea Futures AB, my creative foresight firm—I have yet to decide what they should actually consist of. As such, what follows is something by the way of an experiment, rather than a promise of continuity to come!

That said, I do like a good format, and am a great believer in constraint as the liberator of creativity. Plus I read somewhere that the whole point of weeknotes is that they shouldn't take long, and you shouldn't stress about doing them.

So here's how we'll start: One Big Thing, One Small Thing, and A Clipping.

One Big Thing

This week's big thing was finishing and filing the final drafts for a project I've been working on for my good friends and colleagues at Media Evolution.

This is not one of ME's regular foresight cycles, with which I am also currently involved; it's another thing, for an external client. And while there's been no NDA or anything like that, I'm going to hold off talking about it in the specific until I've been told clearly that everything's good to go.

What I can and will say is that the work involved has been closer to what we might think of as 'trad' scenario-writing than my usual work with ME: that is to say, the narrative position is closer to prophetic/predictive mode than I prefer to go. But rather than using the predictive future tense, we've been working with a sort of present-tense take on the form, which better suits the fairly short-range temporality of the thing, and also takes us a step closer to the design-fictional or narrative-prototypical paradigm of "futures portrayed as their own present".

It's a tricky mode to work with, though, especially when the point of the exercise is not only to portray a possible 2034, but also suggest what happened between now and then. It requires a lot of temporal signposting—and given that the audience will presumably have English as their second language, and will further presumably not have access to the full suite of science fiction reading protocols, I've been obliged to do a lot of stuff which offends the part of me that considers itself to be not only a writer of science fiction, but also a stylist.

That said, it's nice to be doing such work for a client who has actively requested you try to retain as much style as possible, while also solving for ESL readability. Looking forward to finding out how the work is received!

One Small Thing

Yesterday I spent ninety minutes talking (via the intertubes) to a bunch of students at University College Groningen in the Netherlands, which I'm told is basically an attempt to replant the USian liberal-arts university model on European soil.

(Given what seems to be the ongoing self-immolation of that institutional format in its native land, perhaps that transplantation is fortuitous.)

Said students are doing a module on futuring, broadly conceived, and I was asked (by Ryan Wittingslow, who I met at a seminar in Germany back in January) to do some show'n'tell around my narrative prototyping work, and to answer questions related to the projects that the students will be developing through the remains of the academic year.

I'm hoping I might get asked back when the projects are done, if calendars permit...

A Clipping

I clip a lot of articles from the internet into my Obsidian vault every week. In fact, I almost certainly clip far too many! I often blog pull-quotes from them on my civilian blog (Velcro City Tourist Board, if you're curious). I think I want to focus on just one good, futures-pertinent piece a week here at Worldbuilding Agency... so here's this week's selection.

It feels foundationally antisocial to insist that loving a dog is entirely transactional, and reducible to a series of if/then statements or the vagaries of predictive text. Yet, this is what it means to treat a machine learning tool as something capable of understanding us.

We project things on people and dogs. We also project things onto LLMs, computers, all kinds of inanimate objects: “it’s trying to ____,” “it thinks that ___,” etc. This references an imaginary inner state that describes a condition the system is in, but takes on the language that affirms and reinforces the existence of that state. A car isn’t really “trying” to start when the battery is dead. An LLM is not “trying” to answer a question. We use this language and reinforce the metaphor as the reality.

A dog, though? A dog is doing those things.

It feels silly to say that. But the media hype over large language models and the eventual construction of a thinking machine has a way of neglecting the complexity of the relationships we have with thinking beings that already exist.

This piece by Eryk Salvaggio is technically from last week, but I didn't read it until Monday, and that's gonna be my metric going forward.

I've found Salvaggio to be a very valuable and nuanced voice in the last few months, as the Adderall mania of the generative "AI" hype cycle begins to peer over the crest at the leg-breaker black-run ski-slope of the trough of disillusionment. Salvaggio is no refusenik (though I am): he's been making art with various systems that get bundled up under the "AI" banner for many years, and as such finds himself better equipped for an informed opinion than a lot of the breathless hype-beasts who've spent the last year huffing one another's farts on LinkedIn.

This post is particularly timely in the context of the recent death of Daniel Dennett. There's no explicit call-out in Salvaggio's piece, to be clear, but the incredibly reductive view of consciousness to which "AI" boosterism tends to default, and which Salvaggio discusses herein, is very much a product of the influence of Dennett and his ilk over the Silicon Valley set.

I suspect I'm also drawn to Salvaggio's writing because one post tends to contain a sort of tangle of what would probably be three separate posts for a more ordinary writer; if you decide to follow along here at Worldbuilding Agency—as I hope you will!—you will soon realise that I have a tendency to write in a very similar way...

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 18 of 2024. Thanks for reading! Have a good weekend.