Hi y’all! Thanks for being here; welcome to the readers.
Last week was a great opportunity to sharpen the mind by giving a talk about Generative Things for a packed meetup at CLEVERFRANKE. Find my short write-up via the Cities of Things website. Later that week we did a workshop with the Hoodbots (Wijkbots) at the PublicSpaces conferences, including exhibiting the results from the two teams and making an appearance in the plenary closing. It was fun and inspiring to dive into the potential role of urban robots in future public spaces. The Inzamelbot (a version of the Wijkbot made in Afrikaanderwijk project) was part of the kickoff of the new building activities of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
This week’s newsletter has great timing—or not. With WWDC at the beginning of Monday evening, I need to postpone the final thoughts of the week until the last moment. Some of the captured news feels out of date. Some of Apple Intelligence’s plans leaked before, aligning with expectations and developments; seeing them presented definitely triggered more thinking… It builds on the thinking I did for the talk and beyond on generative things, I did last Tuesday.
Triggered thought
There is no way to avoid reflecting on the Apple WWDC keynote announcements. Apple Intelligence, through the stack of devices, enhances all things you can do with your phone or computer with personal intelligence, more than creating new magical experiences. AI for the rest of us was the concluding statement that is a telling frame; making AI accessible to normal use cases. It is undoubtedly well executed and uses the benefits of creating a private, trusted environment that can be used to create new insights on the person. It is, in that sense, the ultimate embodied intelligence.
To relate it to the presentation on Generative Things I gave last week at CleverFranke (see short summary and slides via Cities of Things), wondering what the GenThings will be like. My personal curiosity is more even in the mundane things that will become AI-enhanced or get sneaky AI, depending on the lens and the execution. How will AI make things act differently towards us? How will we treat things? What will our perception of smart-ass things or helpful pals do with our own behavior towards things?
In advance, I wondered if Apple would create a platform for using AI for others rather than offering it as a service on its own. It turns out they chose a combination that makes the core of their own functions intelligent but also offers it as a component for all app makers. It aims for a specific trusted layer of intelligence that must be needed by app makers claiming to protect the users’ interests.
Apple Intelligence seems to live up to the expectations, deeply integrating intelligence into the full stack of our digital life. I think it is interesting to see what interaction model they choose: that of a super personal assistant—leaving the inspirational features to external partners. OpenAI will seamlessly integrate into the Apple Intelligence experiences without being a hidden engine. You know when you use the hallucinating capabilities of ChatGPT in the context of Apple’s Intelligence. Smart.
I am specifically curious to see and find out how it will influence the value of our and others capabilities. With the AI superpowers, we will delegate our own intelligence to the Personal Assistant that AI is. It raises the question of how we are valued by others as we have this capability. If every email and every other text is so easy to correct, will we trust that the writing is genuine? Partly not new, of course, compared Grammarly, which is rewriting the text all the time. Sometimes I choose deliberately not to correct it, even if it might be better. Just to make it more my own.
A telling example here is the enhancement of pictures. It is not a new idea, and Google has introduced it earlier, but what if you remove clutter from the background? Will it be clear to the photo’s viewers that the reality is not as real as it seems? All of our lives become AI-filtered. Will this create the chilling effect I described with the generative things: will we adapt our behavior to the needs of the intelligence layer, losing part of our own identity? How much is AI, and how much is Personal Intelligence?…
So, AI for the rest of us; this is indeed potentially the new iteration in the digital life we already live and dominates our being.
Continue reading for the
- Notions from the news on human-AI partnerships, robotic performances, immersive connectedness, and tech societies
- Paper for this week, this week on The Emerging Political Economy of Foundation Models
- Events for the coming week(s)
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