No.22 — Atlas of the senseable city ? Context, Consent, and Control ? Thinking outside the cone

Quick note: it’s time for a summer break! The next issue will come to you August 13th or 20th. There miiight be a Dispatch to supporting members of the full newsletter next week, I’ve got three articles around a loose topic that I’d like to get to you in a weekly-like format. Otherwise, see you mid-August!

Atlas of the senseable city

Conversation with Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti for the Los Angeles Review of Books. The interview is based on their book, The Atlas of the senseable city, and they discuss the evolution of digital urban maps and their integral role in shaping the future of cities. The authors show how maps serve as tools for understanding and navigating the complexities of urban environments, emphasizing their power in conveying information and shaping societal imagination.

Two parts I especially liked, the definition of the senseable city, where “‘senseable’ suggests a city that is able to sense but is also sensible—not just smart in a technological sense but also responsive to the needs, behaviors, and emotions of its inhabitants.” And their view of maps as infrastructure:

Now, we take for granted that, wherever we go, we can localize something and know where we are. And many systems take for granted that you can follow in real time where things are going. This is what I mean by the map as infrastructure. It has become a support that enables a lot of things that we do.

Maps affect how we perceive and imagine the world around us, so even though they mean infrastructure in a more ‘classical’ sense, the interview reminded me of imagination infrastructure, which is meant to create “socio-technical resources that intentionally enable[s] adoption and appropriation beyond the initial scope of the design.” That last bit on design then reminded me of the incomplete city game/workshop format, which Bryan wrote about last week, the result of which “is a physically impressive isometric drawing of an imagined place, but the real outcome is hours of practice negotiating the diverse and occasionally conflicting needs of the imagined residents of the city.”

No extra conclusion this time around, I just like how these three fit together. (Ok, one more set of connections: their book seems to be one more of those grey fabric-covered designy objects out there.)

You don’t understand digital technology if you try to compare it to the steam engine or electricity. It’s more comparable to the printing press. It changes our social relations. It changes the very nature of who we are, both individually and in groups.

Context, Consent, and Control: The three C’s of data participation in the age of AI

Eryk Salvaggio proposes three key aspects of data participation in the age of AI: Context, Consent, and Control. He discusses the challenges of translating emotions about AI into a legal framework, the need for policies that prioritize individual control over data usage, and explains his concerns about loss of control over personal data in AI systems. Salvaggio advocates for establishing norms that protect data rights and encourage transparency in AI practices.

I’m unsure about his use of “emotions” though. He talks about how data use for AI often “feels” off, and makes a good case for paying attention to those feels and what they represent. I wonder if he’s not making peoples’ opinions harder to take seriously by policy maker, while his aim is exactly the opposite. People feel it’s wrong because LLMs (and the companies making them) use our creations at a scale that doesn’t match our intent when originally sharing them. Taking the respect emotions angle seems like an unnecessary detour. Otherwise, great argument.

It is easy enough for a lawyer to say that Common Crawl is a compilation of facts, and that any text or image that results from an analysis of those facts is fair use. But when we refer to all collective culture as data, we raise questions that defy logic. If I share a photo online, I don’t lose copyright protection over it. But I do lose control over how it is integrated into datasets. […]

Copyright law has by tradition been decided on a case by case basis. Is the legal system prepared for a world where hundreds of thousands of infringements are generated on a daily basis, distributed across millions of users, with no permanent access to what was generated?

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

Waves of the Blue Sea

“Core contributors across a range of disciplines scan for (and make sense of) trends and signals shaping the current social, technological, environmental, economic and political landscape. Using a combination of foresight methodologies and tools, they co-create detailed scenarios to surface changes that can be made today to help create a more flourishing tomorrow.”

Thinking outside the cone

I’d argue with the statement that “technology evolves exponentially,” but otherwise a thought provoking tweak to Voros’ futures cone. “This means that if we truly want to explore the space of futures expansively, we must pass through futures that, from today’s perspective, are impossible. This construction encapsulates the theorization of Dator’s Second Law, which states that ideas about the future, if not ridiculous, fail to capture anything meaningful of the future.”

Mapping archetype scenarios across the three horizons

Via Andy Hines’ blog, a link providing?50 days’ free access to his paper in Futures. “The purpose of this paper is to suggest that mapping of archetype scenarios onto the three horizons could provide a useful starting point for understanding change in a domain.”

The full edition of this week’s Sentiers is available below, subscribe there to get it every Sunday morning straight to your inbox.