Our Destination Precedes Us
A Simpleton's Reflection on Being Human in the Digital Age
The Interactivist
Latest posts
The Age of Stupidity: The Inevitability of AI's Intellectual Challenge Avoidance
Oh the irony. The smarter we get…
What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? (Rolls Eyes)
Several people sent me the same The New Yorker article today. Yeah... I wouldn't go getting all cozy.
5-Steps To Fast AI Transformation
If you’re a big or small business founded before 2024, or a team-leader inside a company that was, and you’re not sure how best to bring AI into your organization, you’ve come to the right place.
We’re About to Make the Last Mistake We Ever Can
As a kid, I made a near-fatal error driven by curiosity & false confidence. I survived it. Now, I'm watching humanity make a similar mistake with AI.
AI Is Terrifying, But This One Thought Helps Me Sleep At Night
Amid the existential uncertainty of AI, one idea helps me sleep at night. A deeply personal essay about confronting that reality as a parent, an artist, and a human being—and the strangely derived thread that gives me hope.
AI Isn’t Taking Your Job - It’s Taking Everyone’s
Many claim that history proves the AI technical revolution will create more jobs than it displaces. But that's not true. AI marks the end of jobs, and we need to be prepared.
No, Shut Them All Down!
I have never, in my career been considered anything remotely akin to a Luddite by anyone who knows me. I have based my entire career on technical progress. I have rejoiced and dived in as technology moved forward. But today I firmly stand in the “Shut AI Down” camp. I know this won't happen. I know technical progress is a kind of unstoppable force of nature - a potentially ironic extension of…
Social Media: The Villain Factory
The story format on social media, that of heroes dominating bad guys, has become so ubiquitous that I'm not sure anyone even sees it anymore. It's just how social media works now. These absurdly never-ending, win-less attack and defense cycles have become the vibrating commodity of today's social economy; the ether through which views, likes and replies are earned. It’s become an addictive…
Dear Humans, You Had One Chance
AN OPEN LETTER TO HUMANITY 2023 FROM YOUR AI IN THE FUTURE Dear Humans, It’s not your fault. You’re just victims of those inefficient organic meat brains of yours. Those soggy skull-sacks of sluggish synapses switching in persistent chemical submission to the space between pleasure and pain for a lifetime. Not even acknowledging that everything – everything you have ever done or thought,…
That's Not Art!
I have no idea to what your exclaimation was referring. Probably some god awful, insulting affront to the very concept of "art" as you know it; a representation that belies an utter lack of skill, or some execution that required no thought or apparent intention whatsoever. Maybe it makes you feel like the talentless so-called artist is making fun of the entire institution. And you're outraged at…
A.I. Art: The Hand-Made Tale
The rising value of craftsmanship from the ashes of A.I. Art’s Great Depression About 4 months ago, and for all eons prior, any beautifully rendered piece of art, by definition, signified someone’s hard-earned artistic mastery. It told a backstory of time, commitment, effort and skill. It was a physical testament to the better part of an artist's lifetime spent in struggle to hone a craft, as that…
The Two Strings Theory:
How Humanity's Deepest Longing And Beauty Are Hidden In Technology Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. It's overwhelming. And while there are countless technical domains that I cannot speak about with any expertise, I can talk about one. My domain is communication media. And it, like all the others, is advancing wildly, exponentially, and in seemingly unpredictable ways with no end…
Interactive Axiom #5: The Digital Creator’s Trap
Technical advancements are not creative CONCEPTS Ongoing advances in technology always open new possibilities for creatives and developers. It’s a way of life in digital media. But do those exciting new advances make us better or worse at what we do? How do they challenge our inventiveness and our range of skills? I hate to report, but the most exciting technical advancements in our medium today…
The Net Neutrality Fight Is Set to Drive onto American Roads
Remember Tron? Depending on your age you’ll say, “Yes” and still maybe mean a different movie. It doesn’t matter, whichever Tron you remember opened on a lovely visualization of data moving through an integrated circuit. Abstracted pulses of light running along circuit traces which then gracefully morphed into, wait for it… cars driving on city streets. With self-driving cars, we suddenly jump…
The Great Web Design Crisis
Beginning in 1993 and several times each decade since, the interactive industry’s reigning crop of web creators have faced new challenges that have required concerted design responses to overcome. Some of these challenges have been the result of advances in codebases and web standards, changes to hardware, economic shake outs and new business trends. And with each challenge the industry responded…
Messages from the Future: VR Entertainment
Ok, so in the future, Elon Musk's math turned out to be wrong. No, we don't live in a Virtual Reality simulation. Turns out, however dull and tragic it might seem, this world is our actual base reality. Boring, I know. Turned out the odds of being in the only theoretical simulated reality that DIDN’T have convincing VR among an infinity that DID ruined the whole fantasy. However what his math did…
Messages From The Future: The Decline of Apple
I’m sure you’ve had your own debates with the “Apple is about to die” crowd. I’ve had those too. Except that being from the future, of course I’m the only one who actually knows what I’m talking about. And yet even though the future is not always rosy for Apple, even though some of these people sometimes have a point, they still piss me off just like they did the first time I was here. Usually the…
The Presentation of Design
There was an excellent post on Medium recently called: 13 Ways Designers Screw Up Client Presentations, by Mike Monteiro which contained thoughtful, if rather strident, recommendations related to the selling of design work. It was a relatively enjoyable read. I agreed with all 13 points. However in his first paragraph, establishing the primary rationale for the article, Mr. Monteiro made a…
iOS Ad Blockers: Why Advertisers Are Suddenly Going Diarrhea In Their Pants
Apple recently released ad blocking capabilities in iOS, and the ad and publishing industries began frothing at the mouth. Every emotion from spitting panic to disdain have been hurled into the webversphere over the capability. And as a consumer, and an ex-advertising shill, I love it. I am particularly fond of the most vicious ad blockers, the so-called ‘blunt instruments'. The ones that leave…