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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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      The Yak Collective @yak_collective has been doing a futures project called Astonishing Stories, led by @SachinB91 and @WabiSabiFutures to explore near-future scenarios. The output is a series of short stories being published as an evolving anthologyhttps://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/ …

      3 replies 7 retweets 42 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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      The stories are based on some structured design fiction type visioning based on something called The Thing from the Future. Project participants spent a few weeks doing the exercises, then writing the stories.http://situationlab.org/project/the-thing-from-the-future/ …

      2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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      I’m not part of this project, but I’m gonna read all the stories (5 out so far and more on the way) and live-tweet my reactions. This will be my 🍿 critical review thread. I don’t quite get the process they used to get to this output, but I don’t think I need to as a reader.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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      First up, Wholeness in a Timeless Activity by Nathan Chenhttps://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/wholeness-in-a-timeless-activity/ …

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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      Pretty neat. A short riff on dark kitchens, through pov of an a sushi chef. AR, mechanical turking, machines training humans training machines, and unexpected effects of software eating farm-to-table supply chain.

      12:11 PM - 20 Nov 2020
      • 3 Likes
      • Vijay Michalik Nathan Chen Adventures in fake Nepal
      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Next up: Your Payment is Ready by Ben Smithhttps://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/your-payment-is-ready/ …

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          So premise here is an indefinitely extended age of pandemics where in-person schooling opportunities are a luxury for high-achiever kids 🧐. Here we have Judd, a kid with a broken machine-learning based clarinet trying to make the orchestra. Fun story but not sure I buy premise.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          The ending is a bit ambiguous. Also the kid is clearly as good a hacker as he us a musician. Wonder if remote schooling with AI assistance will reveal unexpected attitudes. Playing a smart clarinet brings out your jailbreaking skills?

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Taking a break but next up Department of Restoration by Scott Garlinger. These pictures accompanying the stories btw are by artist @being_on_linehttps://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/department-of-restoration/ …

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          taking a break, to be continued

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Ok Scott’s thing is more an impressionistic premise than a story. A Department of Restoration that works on fixing the messy consequences of cancellation as a phenomenon. This could be the basis for an interesting story. Hmm. Conflict could be: the DoR itself gets canceled? 🤣

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Next up Mechanical Turks All the Way Down by Chris Butlerhttps://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/mechanical-turks-all-the-way-down/ …

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Okay another below-the-API story. There’s a theme here. 3 of the 4 stories have involved a human fighting an API Behaving Badly. This one has a Godelian loop of sorts where a machine is evaluating the performance of a human hired to do a humanizing thing against itself 🙃

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Okay on to Out of the Loop by Sachin Benny.https://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/out-of-the-loop/ …

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Okay this is a kitchen sink near-future with UBI, programmable microbot tattoos, a Joker Act to rehabilitate incels... and a hero with a tattoo mirroring his roam graph that he can’t get pretty enough to satisfy his girlfriend because his depression is reflected in his Roam notes

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          This story has a lot going on. Hero is depressed about dead father who wasn’t great and us now signing up for a surrogate father type dating app 🧐 GPT-45 makes an appearance. Also hero has ptsd growing up during pandemic as a high schooler so this maybe 2030s?

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Hero moves on from real to GPT powered surrogate father. Good ending. Well that’s it for now. Will continue this thread as more stories are added.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          These are not pro scifi writers so don’t read with that expectation, but a nice mirror held up to the future to pop out big themes in the zeitgeist. Clearly API alienation caused by APIs Behaving Badly, and transhumanist forms of identity crises and trauma are big ones.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          As stories these all rate between a C- and a B, but taken collectively, the futures exercise seems to have surfaced some A+ patterns. It’s almost a kind of speculative imagination Gallup poll mechanism. I’d like to see a tag cloud or sentiment analysis across the anthology 🤔

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Though I’m obviously partisan as one of the original instigators of the @yak_collective I think this project has serious potential for demonstrating a futures methodology that combines bith scenario planning and design fiction, and does so in a collective intelligence framework.

          2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          There’s 5 stories so far and a few more queued, and then the intention I believe is to keep adding stories. I suspect this approach would really shine past ~25 stories with some meta analysis to bring out collection-level patterns.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 20
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          Product placement: if you’re interested in hiring the yak collective to conduct such a futures exercise, contact @SachinB91 or @WabiSabiFutures. We’ve actually already done one similar client project (not public) that produced a slide deck of visual vignettes rather than stories.

          0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        19. End of conversation

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