What’s for breakfast in an AI world?

General Seminar is back and to kick of Season 05 we’re wandering into and wondering about the AI Future.

Although there is plenty of confusion, anticipation, anxiety, and curiosity about AI these feelings are exactly the kinds of signals that indicate to me that it’s time to find ways to consider the “everyday” and quotidian aspects of the kinds of futures we’d prefer to inhabit. This is when we ask ourselves simple questions in an effort to ground the future in the normal, ordinary, everyday: What’s for breakfast?

General Seminar, the Near Future Laboratory’s platform for sense-making, will give you a taste of how Design Fiction can provide a unique vantage point to engage in possibility and the not true *yet.

General Seminar is a way of workshopping into possible futures.

General Seminar is not a hands-off workshop. You’ll come with us and imagine possibilities of AI by looking around for the artifacts and implications of change.

Rather than making predictions or prognosticating, we operate more like a forensic detective, noticing evolutions of life through clues.

What are we eating for breakfast, we might imagine.

What are we doing for work, assuming such is still described as ‘work’?

What are we doing for entertainment and how is ‘entertainment’ manufactured or created?

With Design Fiction we seek the future through material cultural artifacts of all varieties. A classified advertisement. A billboard. A vehicle. A musical instrument. A speaker. A movie poster. A bag of sweets. And then we examine these things like an archeologist might, trying to unpack and unravel the mysteries of the world with sincerity and humility.

In General Seminar we deliberately move away from the speculation and hyperbole and try to use our imagination to construct worlds inhabited by humans with their typical cares, concerns, and basic human needs. Call it the Future Mundane, or the Normal, Ordinary, Everyday Futures, we want to avoid fetishizing the technology — if only for 90 minutes — to really immerse ourselves in the experience of what life and typical human experiences and user scenarios might be like.

Join me for General Seminar Season 05 Episode 01 on Wednesday March 20th at 10am and 3pm PDT (UTC-7) where we will wander into a possible AI future and wonder about the kinds of worlds we want to inhabit as well as the kinds of AI futures we may find ourselves living within.