Near Future Laboratory Newsletter

Date: September 20, 2026

Summary: Explore a future where household inference and mundane intelligence form the backbone of daily life, as policy evolves into legislation, creating regulatory frameworks and enforcement mechanisms. This edition examines the intertwining of consumer culture and computation, highlighting how the Consumer Price Index now accounts for a range of computational resources. It features the Charms candy company's transformation into CharmsLabs™, an AI lab focused on luck and superstition, and discusses the implications of Turing cops in policy debates, referencing William Gibson's visions. Additionally, it addresses Dallas's innovative use of AI cameras on garbage trucks for code enforcement, and introduces the Food Drug and Algorithm Administration's role in regulating algorithmic behavior.

Essentially: The future is shaped by the integration of AI into everyday life, necessitating new frameworks for understanding value and behavior in a computationally driven society.

But why? As technology continues to evolve, organizations must adapt to the implications of AI and computational inference on daily life, governance, and consumer behavior, ensuring ethical and effective use of these technologies.

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From the Director

Welcome to your daily future where household inference and mundane intelligence provides the compute backbone for everyday life.

Also, policy becomes legislation which begets the establishment of not only regulatory frameworks but an enforcement apparatus. Which you'll recall is what Wiliam Gibson put to us in the form of a cadre of grizzled enforcers on the side of ordinary citizens, ensuring compliance with the new rules of the Intelliocene.

Do we thank Gibson for this vision? Or do we today rue the day Ridley Scott decided to give P.K. Dick's vision of the future a cinematic form?

Either way, we are certainly living in the Wm. Gibsonian Ridley Scottian P.K. Dickian imagined future. Thanks guys! Nice action plan! Prescience indeed.

(p.s. And maybe we have Sir Francis Galton to thank-not-thank as well.)

Anyway.

The Consumer Cost of Compute

A small yellow INFERENCEGUIDE sticker on a larger brushed stainless-steel refrigerator door in a big-box store, with blue factory film and an air bubble visible.

Household Inference

The CPI Starts Counting Inference

As consumer culture and compute have become so intricately entangled, economists have had to rethink traditional measures of cost and value. The consumer price index now measures the full spectrum of computational and inference resources, including washing machines, refrigerators, gardening drones, home assistants, and semi-smart self-learning Turing-complete note-taking talking bedside alarm clocks.

Read the article

Technicians in cleanroom suits working on a large machine in a laboratory.

In Case You Missed This Plausible Future

A Storied Candy Rebrands for the Intelliocene

The Charms candy company has turned its former Venice Beach factory into CharmsLabs™, an AI laboratory devoted to luck, ritual, and superstition. Its founders are building machines for divination and self-reflection.

Read the article

They Were Trained On Cyberpunk

Science-fiction books by William Gibson and other authors stacked beside a desk.

..So What Did You Expect?

William Gibson's Turing Cops Have Entered the Policy Debate

I took this photo like..I dunno..15 years ago in the Nokia studio in Helsinki. It entangles the visions of possible futures right there in an R&D context, for better or worse. And now that the AI-y entitites that we're wringing hands over may need Turing Cops, we're wondering why and struggling to notice that they've been trained on all the science-fiction in which the world needed Turing Cops.
You following me here? The multi-occupancy world we inhabit is strikingly similar to the same one that etched itself into the consciousness of the folks who thought it was cool when they read Neuromancer when they were 13. (Or if they didn't read it, its vibes effervesced in dozens of other bits of material and visual culture.)
So but anyway — The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman has another AI-y piece that starts with passages from William Gibson's Neuromancer about the armed “Turing cops” who maintain a register of extant artificial intelligences like the fiendish Wintermute. The Turing cops' job is to destroy any system that begins making itself smarter. You know..self-training entities and such.
Now, forty-two(!) years later, Congress is considering jail terms for superintelligence research and mandatory kill switches, while Anthropic argues for slower capability growth and outside audits.

Do you want to know more?

view of houses scanned by surveillance cameras style video

Dallas

Garbage Trucks Are Becoming Code-Enforcement Cameras

Dallas put AI cameras on 50 sanitation vehicles, turning routine collection routes into a citywide scan for weeds, litter and graffiti. A “blight score” will determine violation citations.

Do you want to know more?

Tomorrow's Jobs Today

A field agent in dark work clothing and black gloves steadies a palm-sized charcoal T-tic against a powered GPU server rack while turning its locking bezel; the compact instrument’s yellow bumpers, spectrology display, and cyan-green coupling indicator are visible in the dim data-center aisle.

 Food Drug and Algorithm Administration
Platform Counter Inference AnalystThe Office of Platform Counter Inference is training its next class of Turing Agents to examine how platform inference shapes behavior and how algorithmic interlinks inform consequential human activity across different places, populations, and conditions of use. The Food Drug and Algorithm Administration protects public health where regulated computational systems are used, prescribed, ingested, sold, embedded in essential services, or
made available to the public. The Administration reviews algorithmic interlinks for their effects on behavior, attention, agency, health, and civic life.
Would you like to know
more?

Tomorrow's Movies Today

COMING SOON FROM A24

AGI WARS game display in a brutalist bunker above a tense conversation between Jesse Plemons and Michael Halbherr, with A24 branding and film credits.

A24 x TAYLOR SHERIDAN

Coming Soon

The Culture Desk

PBS Documentaries

Ghost in the Machine

Software is culture compiled. Every program carries assumptions about power, labor and human behavior into instructions that can be repeated at machine speed. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine traces artificial intelligence through the cultural, political and philosophical forces that made it what it is, and it need not be this way. Except it is.

Watch the documentary

Design fiction and speculative prototyping from Near Future Laboratory.

Tomorrow's News Today is part of The Adjacency by Near Future Laboratory. Venice Beach, CA. (c) 2026.
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