Sorry, that was quite a long question. I don't think I would have been more succinct if I asked it in person though....

So the question is: what if this time Musk and others like him have got their predictions wrong? You said Musk only delivers a certain percentage of what's promised. But this general vision - AI and automation everywhere - might not come to pass, unlike electronic payments and iPhones.

Doge failed to find real savings and collapsed. Now we learn the US military is using LLMs to identify targets in Iran. If this war turns into a misadventure, partly caused by the use of AI, will the technology companies face consequences?

That's gridlock! People like Sam Altman think that society will be run by automation, using AI models, like ChatGPT. But we've seen scandals where benefits claimants have been punished both in the UK and the Netherlands, after automated system docked their payments.

For instance, no matter how many self-driving Ubers we add to the streets of London it won't be able to compete with the Elizabeth Line for capacity, whose trains carry upto 1,500 people and run 24 times an hour, ie every 2-3 minutes. Asumming 1 car per journey, that's 800,000 Ubers on the streets.

Silicon Valley predicted that driverless cars would be everywhere at the beginning of this decade, and human driving would be banned by the end of the decade. They are in a limited area of 10 US cities. Problems with rolling this out in European cities are legion. Also, we have mass transit.

They mentioned that David Sacks' description of the future in the 90s was pretty accurate. Today we do live in a world with powerful personal computers in our pockets that we use for navigation, payment and browsing the web. But what if Silicon Valley's current vision doesn't come to pass?

Really interesting to hear @quinnslobodian.com and @bentarnoff.com talk about their new book Muskism yesterday. There was too little time for questions and others in the audience were very quick off the mark. Here's what I wanted to ask:

Slime and Reason Slime slowly enters from stage right In 2010, a Japanese researcher Atsushi Tero made a surprising discovery.  He realised that slime mould could reconstruct the transport networks that surround Toky...

You can check out my essay here, and see some stills from the project. I am still working on producing prints, videos, an interactive demo and so on. This project is still in progress, but there's plenty to see already.

I combined the classic slime mould model with game- theoretic dynamics developed by disinformation researchers. What would happen to the slime in the presence of a potentially poisonous food source, especially if some agents refused to listen to those around them. Would panic or poison kill it?

Slime mould simulations are often used to justify the Techno-utopian argument that society is a decentralised, complex, self-organising system, which can be optimized by studying such simulations.

So sorry to hear this. Get well soon!

This was the first album I ever bought on vinyl back in '94. Still listening to it today! Get well soon Morris.

A couple of experiments with routing and 10 PRINT

Find them on rodeo.club:
rodeo.club/post/0x3801D...

#GenerativeArt

Sorry if my reply came across with the wrong tone - I was really just confused about using equations as prompts. I'd not realised that could be possible or how it would work.

I'm still totally confused how you made this. Did you generate it using AI with that prompt? Why would that equation generate this?! I'm also fascinated by the texture, it's wonderful.

Amazing work. I tried using fonts with the Axidraw for the first time to print some Christmas cards and it was much more complicated than I had expected. Looking forward to trying this!

A nice mint of Techno-Utopian Iconography from today.

Thanks Marcelo!

The Coming Storm - S2: 8. The Last Election…? - BBC Sounds A live audience, a professor, and the team

If you want to know more you should all follow @davetroy.com whose excellent podcast has been covering this stuff in some detail for years, and whose research popped up on Gabriel Gatehouse's excellent podcast The Coming Storm:
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

If you're one of the people fleeing Twitter because you are disappointed with M*sk's politics, I'm sorry to tell you that Bluesky is just as libertarian, just as anarcho-capitalist as Twitter. It's not the solution to our problems. But hey! I've got some pretty pictures of birds so that's cool.

Here's an A5 plot of the finished piece

Mired in the mob machine: cyber-libertarians and the broken internet The tech-utopians promised us liberation – but instead liberation has been actively hampered by the technology they designed. Digital artist and musician Tom Giles explores how we got here and the und...

I'm new to this place, so I am going to post up this article from @fullyhuman.bsky.social from a few weeks ago that I wrote about my work "The Boids" which came out earlier this summer.

fullyhuman.org.uk/mired-in-the...

#1 - Military Grey

#3 - Burnt Orange

#2 - Caffeine

First few mints of Techno-Utopian Iconography coming through with some autumnal palettes.

Techno-Utopian Iconography will be live on highlight.xyz tomorrow at 3pm