Last week we organized the 10-year edition of TH/NGS and had next to 15 inspiring workshops and a lively exhibition, keynotes by Matt Webb, Iohanna Nicenboim, and Simone Rebaudengo. These represented the overall vibe very well; let me share.
Where are we now? Simone Rebaudengo took us on a trip through ten years of technology development. Agents, agents, agents. Just like Matt Webb earlier, he stresses the importance of connected agents. Designing is now the design of the relationship and organization between the agents. Not the personality but the system where the agents live.
He refers to Venkatesh Rao: If you build an economy inside things, your control will go from deterministic to stochastic, and maybe it is overkill, but you’ll create true creative complexity. (Venkatesh Rao, 2024)
With the Walkcast, he is already experimenting with how a team of agents can become a micro-studio for creative work. He ends with his beliefs for the next things we will make:
It’s the time for small, custom, niche, crafted intelligent things. It’s the time to build non-linear, spatial, unclear, post-conversational tools. It’s the time for complex, surprising & non-deterministic experiences.
It’s the time to design worlds instead of software inside things.
Matt Webb also used the world as a metaphor for the thinking in personal context windows that drive the new things we will develop. A world of agency, where we get self-driving mode in every system. Becoming an adaptive world of mini-apps that make easy things become trivial. In a world of intelligence too cheap to a meter, it will bring ChatGPT-like intelligence into everything, creating a world of tiny personalities with AI affordances. He is ending with a world we must dream. We are aiming to get the strangeness out of this intelligence while this is delivering opportunities to open up new worlds. We miss what this generation of intelligence makes special. Dreaming, invention, stories, all kinds of hallucination. New things happen on the other side of the bridge.
Are there links to how Iohanna Nicenboim aims for a balance between human-centered AI and more-than-human design to reach a more sustainable and inclusive future? Something we might call Regenerative AI, creating conditions where both humans and non-humans can thrive. Twin intelligence. Technology shapes what it means to be human, and also what it is not.
With all the attention given now to agentic AI, and all the expectations for this as the dominant trend for the coming year(s), understanding that we are designing the world of agents in things, that can inspire new paths while we stay aware of the connections we make, steering it and letting it steers us. Not towards a certain new tool for general intelligence, but for more humanity.
This weekly “Triggered Thought” is written as part of the Target is New newsletter, which offers an overview of captured news from the week, paper for the week, and interesting events. Find the full newsletter here.
About the author; Iskander is particularly interested in digital-physical interactions and a focus on human-tech intelligence co-performance. He chairs the Cities of Things foundation and is one of the organizers of ThingsCon. Target is New is his “practice for making sense of unpredictable futures in human-AI partnerships”.