What happens when the AI-powered algorithms take what was once a peer-to-peer network and turn it into an AI arms race? Cory Doctorow has coined the term enshitification to describe the ways in which many large electronic media platforms from Google to Facebook to (now-called) X and others. He’s speaking to that feeling that I …
Evidence and Learning in the New AI-driven Arms Race Read More »
Seth Godin’s recently published book, The Song of Significance, looks at how we organize our work and the message is profound if we’re ready to hear the song. I’ve written about Seth Godin many times in this space. Seth has written about the issues of work and education and making a difference in thousands of …
Futures work is a branch of design that seeks to translate trends, ideas, and imagination based on data into visions of where we might go. What happens when we bring psychologists along? The popular deployment of generative AI tools has put ‘futures thinking’ into our collective imagination front and centre. We humans love futures thinking …
Far from being messy, the meta middle is the space we are in where we can see the disruption coming and aren’t sure where we need to steer things so we navigate through it. The Messy Middle is a phrase used to describe the part of a project where we’re prone to get lost, mess …
Disruption is often described in abstract terms with time horizons that look long enough to act on. What we see now is far different from that — faster and more intense. You might have had relatively few ideas of what artificial intelligence looked like until last week. That was when the news of ChatGPT made …
Algorithms influence our online experience and as that becomes a bigger part of life it has consequences beyond the digital realm. Visit a website and you’re probably no longer surprised to see advertisements for the very thing you were looking at on another site while online shopping. By now, any social media user should have …
Transformations are easier to understand retrospectively, not in real time. New technologies are about to upend that, forever. It is often difficult to fully appreciate transformation in the middle of it. Most of us might have been ‘wowed’ by the Internet when it came out, but it’s only looking back that we realized how much …
Three numbers tell a story of transformation worth listening to. Our world is changing quickly and this week three numbers came to mind to show just how fast that’s happening and why we need to pay attention if we want to play a role is shaping this transformation. These numbers all point to a need …
Innovation can involve small adjustments or great transformations. Social media provides a case study for understanding why ongoing monitoring and evaluation can tell many different stories about whether change is big or small, for good or for not — or something altogether different. Online social networks like Twitter and Facebook often notify their users of …
