All posts tagged: ai

The virtual and the physical

November 27, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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weeknotes

Hayes Valley is one of the neighborhoods that’s gentrified most since I first moved to San Francisco. What was a collapsed freeway encircled by shabby Victorians and empty lots is now a bougie strip of bars and glossy retail. Strapping young people fill the plaza. Dives have turned into destinations. The main street, meanwhile, is stacked with retail outlets for stores you probably heard about first on the internet. Allbirds, Away, Warby Parker. You know the […]

How to disappear completely

January 3, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Link / Media / Recommendations / Things my friends have made

There are many ways to become invisible. If you’re a person you can try to go underground, take yourself off the grid. If you are a new US military bomber, you can use the laws of physics and materials science to stay off the radar. And if you are a glass frog, you can simply turn your blood transparent. We’re transfixed by invisibility, the art of disappearance. It’s magical. Sometimes that absence is a problem: […]

Radar week 12: Theories and practice

March 24, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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Link

•“The poetics of history from below” • Undark on how nudge theory—which was very exciting to the political classes over the last decade—fared during the pandemic • The Office of Collecting and Design • I love Michael Hobbes. Here’s his recent video on cancel culture (re: the last post) • Why the Center on Privacy & Technology is no longer using the term “artificial intelligence”

How should we feel about that?

July 19, 2021
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media

Eyeballs on the clash of the real and the virtual this week with the news that a new Bourdain documentary features an AI-generated version of the man’s voice reading out emails he sent people (notably, I think, the audio appears to have been used in the trailer.) This NYer piece, featuring my colleague Karen Hao in quotable form, goes through some of the issues. Creating a synthetic Bourdain voice-over seemed to me far less crass […]