Hi, y’all!
It has been a tumultuous week. In the Netherlands, the four political parties negotiating a new government have reached a form of agreement. It is perhaps rather weak as an agreement but dark in the subtext. Without any plans for the future, only policies of repression of imaginary problems. I won’t go into details here; there is enough on that in other places, but it all does not make for any optimism. The thing to hope for is that the opposition can find engaging narratives as alternatives to promote better futures before this falls apart and fuels new populism play.
It is especially important with the rapid shifts through developments in AI and the impact on our perceived reality, as we saw last week with OpenAI and Google presenting new futures. I mentioned the OpenAI demo last week, but things have become more carved out combined with the Google presentation. Even as the demos of Google are classified as vaporware for some part… It is also remarkable how quickly the promises of the physical AI and the enchanted devices become believable, which was so negative a couple of weeks ago with Humane and Rabbit introductions. The new devices of mainstream brands have become AI machines.
Triggered thought
Ubiquitous computing was one of the terms from two decades ago that started IoT and physical computing. Having things connected to the internet created a new reality of computing everywhere at every moment. It mainly merged in our computing communication devices, but that is another story. Now, we seem to be at the verge of ubiquitous AI and omnipresent digital assistants, as Casey Newton describes. His analysis of the impact of the web as we know it can be even more extended into a managed decline:
(…) it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real-time, Google, at last, has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai himself sees the evolution into a new AI-based search as a positive thing for the web experience.
Let’s keep this in mind when thinking about the real ubiquitous AI. In a podcast with Dan Hill, he discusses AI as infrastructure and argues that AI will become part of our physical infrastructure soon (as it is not already happening). Connecting these, you might wonder how it will impact our experience of the real world.
We are slowly approaching the moment we know more about Apple’s plans and strategy for AI developments. I thought this interesting: Apple is making data center chips. That would make sense from the other end, creating a closed ecosystem that optimizes the edge (devices) and cloud (data center) as one continuous communicating system, empowering ubiquitous AI in speed and security.
It makes a lot of sense for them to present a vision of ubiquitous AI from the perspective of an embodiment of AI. So, we not only have AI at our fingertips via our devices or being linked on demand if we want to make sense of things in our environment. The embodiment means that our interaction with things is becoming a continuous interacting system.
The difference with good old IoT is clear; we have now this “generative things” we interactive with, or interact with us. How will that influence our perspective on what is real?
Read the notions of the news, paper for this week and events to track, via the newsletter. You can also subscribe for weekly updates on Tuesday 7 am CEST.
target is new 