The Jamverse Jam worldbuilding contest closes today, July 31, offering creators a final chance to submit artifacts for a shared extended universe based on four interconnected story cycles published over the past year. The contest aims to expand this protocol fiction world with community contributions, with AI use encouraged, to create a richer and more complex narrative universe inspired by Fred Pohl's concept of predicting the traffic jam rather than the automobile.
AI systems inherit the fundamental crookedness and contradictions inherent in human thought, making them unsuitable vehicles for creating perfectly rational or straight solutions. To responsibly develop and deploy AI, we must understand and work with this essential crookedness rather than pretend it can be engineered away, drawing philosophical insight from Isaiah Berlin's work on human limitations.
Venkatesh Rao
AI personalities in science fiction, from Adams' Genuine People Personalities™ to Banks' self-naming Minds, function as ecological markers that reveal not just individual dispositions but the social fabric of entire civilizations. Rao argues that these naming practices constitute a 'high-personality ecology' where names operate as true names disclosing fundamental social structures rather than arbitrary identifiers.
Venkatesh Rao
Botao Amber Hu presents 'Protocoling HCI,' an early-stage design theory arguing that HCI must shift from designing moments of use to designing protocols as infrastructural material that shapes local action spaces while enabling emergent collective behavior. Drawing on Michael Levine's work on agential material, bioelectric morphogenesis, and 'cognitive glue,' plus concepts like emergent engineering and reverse game theory, Hu proposes that protocols act as 'trust compressors' that let bounded agents coordinate without full mutual knowledge, illustrated through the NFT art piece Merge as a 'protocol art' example.
Botao Amber Hu