Weeknotes 306 - boosted humans by in-ear intelligence

Hi, y’all!

Just like last week a short holiday edition.

Triggered thought

One of the topics in the reflections on the Apple keynote dealt with the move to acceptance of the “boosted human”. I used this term some years ago in the context of new mobility, but we see it now getting normalized for audio and conversations and for adding the AI layer as possible next. See this “3 drivers for the next decade” from 2020 and “drivers for mobility” in 2018.

The hearing aid is positioned for people losing hearing capabilities by age, but this will easily be normalized as people loose qualities at a younger age. It is, of course, a bit cynical and techsolutionism to solve a problem that is created partly by the tech themselves, the in-ear headphones. But that aside.
The FDA approved the technology already, an important step.

Also the click-for-AI function of the button, is part of this. And is well aiming for social acceptance by leapfrogging earlier tech solutions by creating a smooth and above all compelling using experience. As Apple did so many times before, I don’t need to recall this here.

Of course, there might be a scenario in which this will not play out well, mainly if there is overpromise and underdelivery from the AI, as is not happening with early devices like Rabbit and Humane, but you can make the case that this is not for the AI but for the lacking device experience, which is the domain of Apple to solve, of course.

The narrative of the Vision Pro on how it can integrate a socially acceptable intervention of personal life, making pass-through believable might be part of it. It is cringe sometimes how it is presented, but it might tone down in the way we cannot foresee, and look back on in 5 years as unbelievable. We’ll see…

Let’s connect another announcement of last week by Google on how NotebookLM making conversations of all types of content, synthetic podcasts that makes us more easily understand complex information that makes it possible to access above par complex information. It is a form of boosted humans, and what is interesting to stress is how it is orienting AI in context of human. Sometimes, people wonder why humans are interfering with the AIs working much more efficiently without humans, but we need to keep in mind that the AI is only making sense if it is in the context of human interactions with humans and AI in the mix. We as humans make the A in AI. Otherwise it is just other intelligence.

For the subscribers or first-time readers (welcome!), thanks for joining! A short general intro: I am Iskander Smit, educated as an industrial design engineer, and have worked in digital technology all my life, with a particular interest in digital-physical interactions and a focus on human-tech intelligence co-performance. I like to (critically) explore the near future in the context of cities of things. And organising ThingsCon. I call Target_is_New my practice for making sense of unpredictable futures in human-AI partnerships. That is the lens I use to capture interesting news and share a paper every week.

Notions from the news

Again, in this short edition, just some random links I captured without going through all of my RSS.

OpenAI Unveils New ChatGPT AI Models With Enhanced Reasoning | PYMNTS.com

OpenAI has introduced its new “o1” series of reasoning models, which the company touts as a major advancement in artificial intelligence to tackle complex

PYMNTS.comPYMNTS

Mistral AI Unveils Pixtral 12B, a Multimodal AI Model for Text and Image Processing

Pixtral 12B is based on Mistral’s Nemo 12B, a previously released text model, with the addition of a 400-million-parameter vision adapter.

MaginativeChris McKay

Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy. Here’s How It Actually Works

Private Cloud Compute is an entirely new kind of infrastructure that, Apple’s Craig Federighi tells WIRED, allows your personal data to be “hermetically sealed inside of a privacy bubble.”

WIREDCondé Nast

Nevada will use Google AI to process a backlog of unemployment cases

Nevada has a new helper in its quest to plow through a backlog of unemployment claims: Google AI. Gizmodo reports that the initiative will task a cloud-based AI model with analyzing appeals hearing transcripts and suggesting whether they should be approved.

EngadgetWill Shanklin

Scaling: The State of Play in AI

A brief intergenerational pause…

One Useful ThingEthan Mollick

The State of UX in 2024

From design tools, to our design process, to the user behaviors that will change the way we design — a list of what to expect for User Experience (UX) Design in the next year.

UX TrendsFabricio Teixeira, Caio Braga

colored yarns weave microchip patterns onto hyperthread tapestry series by richard vijgen

hyperthread by data artist richard vijgen examines the intersection of microchip design and textile weaving.

designboom | architecture & design magazinerichardvijgen

And a nice listen is the interview with Yuval Harrari on dangers of AI burocrats.

Looking forward

No promises for next week. Rain has stopped here in Bratislava, the river is still very high but the old city might remain dry. We are able to do some proper exploring of the city and around hopefully.

Don’t forget to check the latest news on TH/NGS 2024 and our call for proposals.

Enjoy your week!