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
The Protocol Symposium 2026 officially launches with parallel workshops and 50+ talks exploring how AI and protocols are reshaping planetary conditions under the theme 'New Nature.' The event brings together researchers and practitioners to investigate the emerging technological landscape governed by novel rules at the intersection of artificial intelligence and protocol science.
Venkatesh Rao