Hi all!
As always, let me introduce myself to new readers. This newsletter is my personal weekly digest of the news from last week, of course, through the lens of topics that I think are worth capturing and reflecting upon: human-AI collaborations, physical AI (things and beyond), and tech and society. I always take one topic to reflect on a bit more, allowing the triggered thoughts to emerge. And I share what I noticed as potentially worthwhile things to do in the coming week.
If you’d like to know more about me, I added a bit more of my background at the end of the newsletter.
Enjoy! Iskander
What did happen last week?
To follow up on the rebranding of the newsletter. Last week I did some thinking about this. It is always less easy to take this introspective by yourself, so I am happy to join a small group of three to validate our own progress, and beyond. Also had discussions before with others.
It used to be a tradition to enter proposals for the SXSW panelpicker. One time it was successful back in 2016 already. I did had the deadlines sharp this year and I am in general in doubt how relevant SXSW is nowadays. But when I was reminded by Sam and asked if I did enter a proposal it started brewing. Some of the topics I am thinking about come together, from the design for collectivity and immersive AI in our physical lifeworld, and the relation to the cult of immediacy, what I boiled into the triad of immersion, see this short post at Cities of Things.
So I took the weekend to linger and flesh out a short proposal, titled “Crafting Collective Protocols for Immersive AI Worlds”.
What did I notice last week?
Scroll down for all the notions from the last week’s news, divided into human-AI partnerships, robotic performances, immersive connectedness, and tech societies. Let me choose one per category here:
Human-AI partnerships: An interesting exploration of writing and reading in the age of AI. Writing as a fun experience can keep us trained.
Robotic performances: Self-recycling robots.
Immersive connectedness: You can expect (hope) the Apple Watch with Apple Intelligence to be the poster child for embedded and ambient AI.
Tech societies: Is GPT-5 around the corner? And will it be safe for the world?
What triggered my thoughts?
Two seemingly unrelated concepts captured my attention this week – one from a podcast asking whether AI can teach critical thinking, the other from another podcast discussing “ambient agents.” As I reflected on both, connections emerged.
Can AI truly model critical thinking when it’s designed to provide answers rather than embrace uncertainty? In the core, they calculate probabilities for next tokens but present outputs with authority. Which, of course, is also the only conclusion the AI can draw unless it is challenged by its user. For critical thinking you need to be aware of possible flaws in your reasoning, or in other words embrace the value of uncertainty, not in the core of AI.
The question isn’t whether AI systems should pretend to be humble (“I’m not sure about that…”), but whether they can embody genuine uncertainty. A large language model doesn’t “know” things – it predicts likely text continuations based on training data. When it confidently states something incorrect, is this a failure of humility or simply the system working as designed?
Perhaps what we need isn’t AI that mimics human uncertainty but interfaces that honestly communicate probabilistic thinking. We need a new language for expressing degrees of certainty that users can interpret and evaluate. The challenge isn’t programming humility but designing for transparency.
This brings me to the second thought that was triggered – the concept of “ambient agents” running continuously in the background of our lives. These aren’t systems we explicitly query but ones that observe, learn, and occasionally intervene based on accumulated patterns.
This reminded me of work I explored a decade ago around Google Glass and early smartwatches, what I called “trigger-based interactions” (a slidedeck from back then) .” Back then, I argued that notifications would create an entirely new interface layer responsive to contextual cues rather than explicit commands.
What’s fascinating about today’s ambient agents is how they extend beyond simple contextual triggers. They don’t just respond to immediate stimuli but collect patterns over time, drawing conclusions from the archaeology of our behavior. It’s not action-reaction but a form of continuous presence.
These two concepts – AI’s relationship with uncertainty and ambient intelligence – intersect in interesting ways. An agent that’s always watching needs mechanisms for communicating confidence levels even more than a chatbot. When AI shifts from answering our questions to anticipating our needs, the stakes of overconfidence multiply.
Our culture of immediacy complicates this further. We’ve trained ourselves on instant gratification, on notifications demanding attention. Yet ambient AI offers a different possibility: technology that accumulates understanding patiently over time, presenting insights with appropriate tentativeness.
The most important design challenge may be creating systems that can whisper doubts as clearly as they proclaim answers – ambient agents that know when not to act, that can communicate uncertainty without disappearing into uselessness.
As AI increasingly becomes environmental rather than tool-like, these questions transform from theoretical to practical. How do we design intelligence that lives in the shadows of our attention while maintaining the critical stance necessary for genuine thinking? The answer may determine whether ambient AI becomes a thoughtful companion or just another source of unwarranted certainty in lives already overflowing with false confidence.
What inspiring paper to share?
More about agent-based models in this paper: Diffractive Interfaces: Facilitating Agential Cuts in Forest Data Across More-than-human Scales
As cities worldwide adopt data-driven approaches to optimize urban forests, computational tools like agent-based models (ABMs) are increasingly popular to simulate forest growth and inform planting decisions. However, ABMs often focus on individual metrics, neglecting forests as interdependent ecosystems.
Drawing on feminist theorist Karen Barad’s concepts of “diffraction” and “agential cuts,” we craft a repertoire of diffractive interfaces that engage with forest simulation data, revealing how more-than-human bodies can be encountered across diverse temporal, spatial, and agential scales.
Elisa Giaccardi, Seowoo Nam, and Iohanna Nicenboim. 2025. Diffractive Interfaces: Facilitating Agential Cuts in Forest Data Across More-than-human Scales. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 135–147. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735404
What are the plans for the coming week?
As I mentioned above, this is the last Target New-named newsletter. Nothing is changing, but it is. For me, I need to dive into some WordPress and Ghost instances to determine the best merging strategies. I’ll see how that turns out…
I am looking forward to having more inspiring chats and planning for ThingsCon. More proposal writing is on the roll, and I am expecting to go to https://riseoftherainbow.nl/
Furthermore, I was not aware of any specific events. Don’t forgot to celebrate the pride.
The location for the ThingsCon Salon of 4 September is confirmed (in Scheveningen).
See you next week!
target is new 