Tools For Thought

The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative.

If we want to build something that aids us both in our thinking process and the expression of our ideas – a thinking-writing thing – that thing must be a medium , not a tool. A thinking-writing medium that enables us to think new thoughts and imagine new stories by allowing us to think beyond pieces of paper and our working memory. This must be wha... See more

Perhaps that is why so many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously semi-watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep. One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of m

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Charles Broskoski: Where does your impulse to organize come from?

Damon Zucconi: It’s less an impulse to organize and more an impulse to locate productive structures that I could work within. I’ve always had this sense that if you build a container for something, you will make things to fill it. What I frequently do is try to figure out different co... See more

I gave a talk about Noosphere at the Summer of Protocols program.Here’s a teaser. I go wide!We cover Noosphere, tools for thought, how the web centralized, the dream of collective intelligence, and how we might recover it with decentralized protocols.

In the most practical sense, we are now much less limited by ideas than ever before. Even people who don’t consider themselves creative now have access to a machine that will generate innovative concepts that beat those of most humans (though not the most creative ones). Where previously, there were only a few people who had the ability to come up ... See more

Even with obvious deficiencies, large prompt-commanded multimodal models are proving to be flexible cognitive tools representing an unprecedented generality. But the directness, diversity, and degree of user interaction create a distinctive “human-centred generality” (HCG), rather than a fully autonomous one. HCG implies that —for a specific user— ... See more

This “undulant interface” was made by John Underkoffler. The heresy implicit within is the premise that the user, not the system, gets to define what is most important at any given moment; where to place the jeweler’s loupes for more detail, and where to show only a simple overview, within one consistent interface.

Though he knows it’s not fairly common, Colin’s left needing more:

What if there was a way to overlay somehow that I drank half a bottle of BodyArmor when I started the run? And at mile 6, I briefly stopped to drink some water and eat an energy gel.

And then how can I compare how that nutrition impacted my metrics compared to two weeks earlier when I... See more