It’s 2023 and we should probably get ready.
Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?
Very early ACCELERANDO vibe here. Remember when these ideas seemed vital and innocently progressive? I still love the idea of memory prosthetics, but I don’t know if anyone’s okay with their every spoken word being hackable.
Over here, the UK government spent the end of 2022 trying to weaken encryption, by the way.
A Berlin-based scientist has unveiled a novel solution for Europe’s tumbling birth rates: “the world’s first artificial womb facility.”
Dubbed EctoLife, the concept is the brainchild of Hashem Al-Ghaili, a Yemen-born biotechnologist and science communicator. His invention comprises 75 separate labs, each of which accommodates up to 400 adorable “growth pods,” which replicate the conditions of a mother’s womb. Al-Ghaili claims a single building can incubate 30,000 babies a year.
EctoLife is basically a design-fiction “provocation,” but the tech scene is apparently full of bros who want to put their babies into as many gestation receptacles as possible, and cutting out the human breeding object that requires emotional investment and personhood may seem like an excellent option.
Sad to see BOOKFORUM folding. It’s going to be an interesting and combative year in culture. Happy new year.