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.
This editorial introduces Obliquities, a new column examining the shift from destination web to social media as a fundamental transformation in how intelligence is produced and distributed through protocol infrastructure. The piece proposes the concept of a 'social kernel' to understand how RSS, the Facebook newsfeed, and algorithmic feeds restructured both user behavior and the underlying protocols that now mediate information consumption.
Protocolized
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.
Venkatesh Rao
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