Two Futurists Go ‘Vibe Forecasting’

Whenever fellow futurist and longtime friend Rob Tercek and I get together, we go crazy deep on the future: What happens when lazy humans outsource their thought process to machines? You get a society that vibes its way into a blurry, sub-optimal future. The surge of slop means that AI is creating more work for humans instead of stealing our jobs. I join Rob on his podcast The Futurists to cut through the hype and the skepticism about modern tech, calling out AI mediocrity and reminding us why human learning remains painful. Topics include: ChatGPT psychosis, why we need a generation of PhDs to revisit eternal questions about Truth, the perpetual dawn of AGI, what happens to the political economy when the populace is siloed into bubbles, why Kremlin propagandists produce propaganda for machines instead of people, why experience cannot be generated, why autocracies need accurate data, and the real reason why people get lost in untruth. Just some light listening for you.

Big thanks and more at The Futurists podcast – https://thefuturists.com

Series 2024 – Halloween Special: Ghosts in the Machine

Google’s new NotebookLM digests documents to create AI summaries, and provides an incredible new way to search a vast set of information. One little throwaway feature became a viral hit – “Audio Overview”, which creates a ‘podcast’ featuring two clever, chipper – and entirely synthetic – personas, engaging in a ‘deep dive’ on the content within NotebookLM. In the spirit of Halloween, we uploaded the scripts for the first four episodes of Series 2024 – and NotebookLM rose to the occasion. Is this the future of podcasting? And — HAVE I JUST BEEN PUT OUT OF A JOB?

Series 2024 – Episode TWO: THE FOUR DAY WEEK IS ALREADY HERE

The pandemic permanently broke the link between work and place. In the aftermath we’ve rejiggered everything connected to work-life balance – in favour of life. This means we’ve stumbled into a new reality: the ‘four-day week’ is a reality for most office workers – even if no one wants to name it. How did this happen? Have a listen and find out.

Episode 6.25 What’s happening to the way we work?

Atlassian’s ‘work futurist’ Dom Price and resilience expert Sally Dominguez guide us through a new world of work, post-pandemic. Then we speak with two leaders at the coalface, both finding unique paths to help their staff thrive in a world of work that looks nothing like what any of us have ever known.

Brought to you by Oracle.

Read the paper in Nature that explores how videoconferencing wrecks group creativity.

Episode 1.05: The Future of Learning with Kate Torney

Pretty much every fact you’ll ever need for any problem you have to solve can now be accessed almost instantly through any smartphone. What does that mean about how we learn? And what about the places where we learn – schools and libraries? If everything is available everywhere, why go anywhere in search of knowledge? State Library of Victoria CEO Kate Torney explores why libraries have a future that remembers the past, yet looks out on a future where access to knowledge in only a part of the story.

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