Sounding out ideas on language, interaction, and iconicity
The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current location and the Volta river, in an area currently known as the Togo Plateau. Names they use for this area include Mawu kùbe ('Mawu mountain') and Àwubeame ('in the Mawu mountains'). Hunters who frequented the area told me they were familiar with several ìkpakpi…
The mirage of "AI" reaches us through a narrative centered on inevitability, productivity, and efficiency. It is therefore at loggerheads with the values of a healthy academia, which questions narratives of inevitability, prioritizes process over product, and realizes the value of friction for creativity. This workshop is for everyone who is bored about the typical AI sales pitch and interested in…
We ve revamped the Futures of Language website, now at the futuresoflanguage.org domain, and our Living Library keeps growing. Here is
The machine will be able to recreate all of this! But the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine — this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being. Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.
In the past months we've started the Futures Library, in which we share key ideas and people that drive the project. The first few weeks have featured a wide variety of themes and technologies, from pluriversalism to cosmotechnics and allohistorical maps to magic lanterns.
What seemed an open-and-shut case of plagiarism turned out to be symptomatic of a much more worrying issue: the runaway influence predatory publishers have on declining scholarly standards. The good news: everything is on hand to start creating the future we want. Academics should vote with their feet and move towards scholar-led diamond open access.
Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving. — Ivan Illich, 1984, Silence is a commons
During the pandemic I built a gather town co-working space for my team. The free tier enabled our team to be together even when working from home. Folks claimed their desks and co-designed the space. Multiple papers were written here and collaborations blossomed. As gather town 1.0 closes down, we say goodbye. In this post I share a few recollections and reflect on what made the gather town…
When you're enamoured of a technology and someone points out important ethical challenges, a typical reflex is to seek permission: yeah, but what about this use? If you find yourself seeking permission, one useful thing to do is to step back and inspect the underlying value conflict. What does your own moral compass say? Centering values leads to mindful choices. As you move from a tech-first to a…
Some thoughts on generative AI, reproducibility, and why the praxis of slow and reproducible science provides a useful lesson for navigating the lures of "AI".