Why do organizations lose the capacity to imagine and recognize unfamiliar possibilities? How we can regain this essential ingredient of innovation? There is a delicate balance between imagination and structure/ Different kinds of thinking lead to actionable insights inside organizations, while some kinds of thinking tend to make the ground for expansive creativity and innovation less fertile than it might otherwise be. How can researchers, designers, strategists, and engineers make room for unfamiliar possibilities inside systems dominated by speed, tooling, and orthodoxy? We're seeing how the tools for building and testing ideas have never been faster — or more sometimes more constraining. When innovation pipelines are optimized for speed and polish, organizations can quietly lose their capacity to notice and act on genuinely unfamiliar possibilities. In this session, Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory) is joined by Jay Hasbrouck (Google) to explore why imaginative range atrophies and what it takes to recover it.

Another Design Fiction Dispatch where we explore the implications of equitable access to high-quality large language models (LLMs) and the emerging debates around technological equity, rights, and the potential for a new digital divide.

We went to a future in which the “constitutions” that have been mysteriously decanted into the LLMs used throughout everyday life are now seen through the policies and regulations and doctrinal ephemera that govern their behavior and influence their interactions with and amonst us throughout our identies, cultures, societies, communities and normal, ordinary, everyday life. From the profound to the pedestrian and mundane, the effervescence of these doctrines called (perhaps wrongly) “constitutions” can be found in the form and shape of things like street signs, grocery store receipts, and other everyday artifacts that subtly encode the rules and norms by which these intelligent systems operate.

Inference capacity is starting to acquire the political and procurement logic of fuel, power, and other constrained inputs. Once continuity of compute matters more than general convenience or operational needs of an organization, then compute becomes a strategic reserve problem. Imagine a world in which compute is defined by policy as a national security issue and a scarce resource deserving of strategic reserves, futures markets, and geopolitical leverage. This article explores the implications of that world and the signals that suggest we are moving in that direction.

AI companies are writing constitutions. The White House wants to overrule the states. States are refusing. Defense agencies want fewer red lines. Export controls are already turning advanced AI into a geopolitical access regime. Meanwhile, everybody keeps saying "alignment" as though this were merely an engineering concern.

This General Seminar is for policy advisors, strategists, technologists, public-interest technologists, governance teams, and institutional decision-makers who need a better language for what is actually happening: a live struggle over legitimacy, access, and who gets to write the rules for powerful models.

A Certain Obscure Chinese Encyclopedia

In this episode of the Near Future Laboratory Office Hours, we swam into the evolving landscape of consumer surveillance, sparked by the introduction of always-on AI glasses. The discussion was rich and multifaceted, touching on the cultural, ethical, and practical implications of these devices. We explored the Ban Ray project, a culture-jamming initiative aimed at making AI glasses socially unacceptable through a distributed toolkit of stickers, stencils, and design interventions. The conversation also highlighted the importance of social conventions in shaping technology adoption and resistance, as well as the need for nuanced regulatory approaches that distinguish between genuinely assistive technologies and those that are primarily extractive. Overall, it was a thought-provoking session that underscored the complex interplay between technology, society, and individual agency in the face of emerging surveillance tools.

Are you asking yourself how to find your path in this crazy world in which we are feeling the anxiety of AI but also the excitement of new possibilities? Do you have a sense of what you want to do next, but are not yet sure how to make it real enough to be seen and recognized? If so, then this info session for the Pitch, Picture, Prototype workshop is for you. Carl DiSalvo, Lisa Konishi and I will walk through the workshop structure, the kinds of projects it is built for, and how to tell whether it’s right for you.

The Enshittificator finds things to make the world worse and then he makes them worse..but it doesn't really pay off..until he realizes that in fact...it does pay off if can convice people that they need the enshittified version of the thing.

It's a story about how capitalism and human nature can create a feedback loop of degradation, but also about how sometimes you can make a little bit of money by being the one who makes things worse for everyone else.