Last week I was in London working with a group of senior executives and leadership from the AI commercial, policy, and venture capital arenas to ask deep questions about the artificially intelligent futures we are very quickly inhabiting.
As stimulus for the discussions we had over two days, I created this 32 page newspaper from an AI future.
This project, as you here will appreciate, is a Design Fiction artifact that imagines a world where artificial intelligence is mundane, woven seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. We used this as one of the prompts/provocations leading into a two-day workshop on AI policy and strategy.
Through the newspaper we explored the implications of AI futures through speculative narratives and future artifacts. I created this over the course of a couple of weeks leading up to the workshop itself, integrating the conversations we were having in preparation to reflect those analytic topics in more of a felt way.
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Each artifact in the newspaper (e.g. advertisements, classified ads, news articles, etc.) was created to provoke and inspire the workshop participants to think about the implications of AI futures. Each was also an extrapolation of current trends in AI and machine learning, as well as a reflection of the broader societal, ethical, and policy implications of increasingly pervasive intelligent systems.
Each piece of content in the newspaper represents a material cultural component of the world, based on current trends as well as speculations about the multiple directionalities and implications of AI futures.
Topics covered include AI-enabled spiritual and psychic rituals, Digital Twins (‘Digitwins’ in-world), AI-enabled companion species, AI-enabled emotional support intelligences (ESIs), home appliances, toys, sports as AI-backed simulations, crime ('prompt front-running’), entertainment (generative films, generative music, the future of the record 'album'), and more.
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