There’s a feeling you getin the presence ofbeautiful buildings and bustling courtyards.A sense that these spacesare inviting you to slow down,deepen your attention, and bea bit more human. What if our software could do the same? This is the opening to the Resonant Computing Manifesto, a charter that aims direct our attention to the human…
The question isn’t “when will the robots become self-aware and take over?” The real question is, “are the robots adding life, supporting humanity, right now?” For instance, when AI is used to help radiologists read mammograms, there is a 20% improvement in detecting cancer. This is clearly a case where AI adds life. But when…
Reading source material, taking notes, then transcribing and rearranging those notes, and finding connections between them are all central to thinking, according to Sönke Ahrens. Legendary note-taker Niklas Luhman argued that it was impossible to think without writing. Now of course you could very easily feed a LLM a big stack of research papers and…
Here are two delightful animations that illustrate the idea of structural unfolding popularized by Christopher Alexander. They are fun to watch. And thought-provoking. A Matter of Form by Rene Jodoin A Geometry of Circles by Philip Glass Via Kottke
I once read a story about NASA engineers working on one of the first research satellites. They spent a long time trying to design a motorized system to deploy the solar panels that would power the satellite. Every solution they came up with was too complicated, too big, or required batteries that were too heavy.…
The Center for Humane Technology is working to popularize the term “AI drift,” describing a model’s tendency to degrade in performance over time. I’m not crazy about the term because I don’t think it clearly communicates the dangers that AI presents to people as they go about their daily lives. In my workplace I’m seeing…
One way to bring life back to the internet is to make it weird again. According to software developer Jonas Hultenius, quirkiness is one of the things that made the early web feel alive. Today’s obsession with metrics and vitality are starving off everyday treasures, small wonders, and genuine oddities. If you were online in…
In the final act of Picasso at Lapin Agile, a mysterious visitor from the future, wearing blue suede shoes, enters the bar and makes a striking pronouncement. VISITOR: ‘Cause this century, the accomplishments of artists and scientists outshone the accomplishments of politicians and governments. The rest of ensemble, including Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and a…
When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system. This quotation, attributed to the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, gives me hope that small groups of people working together may be able to shift our chaotic politics into something better. But is it realistic, or…
In order to make something that feels truly “alive” at the deepest level it can help to imagine that you are “making a gift to God.” At each step of the making process you evaluate which option is the most authentic or “true” by evaluating how well it brings out the spirit of the thing…
To me maintenance feels like a chore. It’s something you have to do, but it detracts from all the things you could be doing. But there’s another way of looking at maintenance. You are keeping something alive. In this sense you aren’t simply maintaining. You are gardening. The Garden and Desire A garden is a…
When you first start on a writing project you don’t know what the structure of your project will be. As you do research, collect ideas, and clarify your thoughts, the structure will emerge. Using a tool like Tinderbox lets you test your ideas and see what kind of structure provides the best fit for your…
Starting a design with a sketch risks starting with too much information – and information that is likely not a good fit with the project. There becomes a risk of working on and strengthening irrelevant parts of the structure at the expense of latent centers that are essential to the project. Christopher Alexander proposes starting…
