The park at Petersham Gate has been renovated. It's lovely.

It's been a week of talks. On Wednesday I went to Interesting 2025, a distinctly down to earth evening of talks on things the speakers find interesting. I certainly found them interesting too. There was the link between autism and cosplay and a father's pride watching his daughter talk about her experience to a hall full of people. There were the speakers who found language interesting. First, Japanese and its suffering passive, the appreciation of things in the shadow of their absence, that pardon me literally translates as 'I will commit a rudeness'. Polish and its concept of Kombinować – similar to Jugaad – to figure out a way of doing something, often by bending the rules. There was the talk about how the Netherlands created 126sqkm of green space by letting people remove 1.5 paving slabs outside their windows where they faced onto a road, and supplying soil so people could grow little gardens. This wasn't about language, but the Dutch word for taking up paving slabs is Tegelwippen which is just a fantastic feeling word. There was the reappraisal of fairytales of survival manuals for societal collapse. There was toilets, the catch 22 of being a selective mute, hopeful technology, a guide to fighting facism from lived experience in Apartheid South Africa, bouncing lies, global breakfast radio, robot dancing (with actual robot dancing), and how the best bit of a newspaper is the obituaries.

I think there were others too, but I didn't take notes and this was everything I remembered on the train home, frantically smashing the memory into my phone having left it firmly in my pocket for the preceding four hours. I will definitely be going back next year. The loosely affiliated, if only in spirit, Papercamp just got announced for September this year too. I will be going to that if anyone wants to come along.

The day after Interesting brought my own talk. For students and alumni of Full Sail University's digital marketing degree, I shared my perspective on how AI will impact the way people make decisions about how to spend their money (it's easier to say consumer decision making, but few people sit down to make consumer decisions). I shared one possible future scenario and I think I scared people just enough to ask themselves some good questions about the role of marketers in the future. I'll share it when I get a copy of the video. Prepping for this I've been speaking to a bunch of different people to get some different perspectives (one bad thing about working for yourself is having fewer people to bounce things around with). I aim to turn this into a podcast mini-series over the next couple of weeks.

And Iain and I shared another Sidebar after a few weeks off. This time we chatted about loneliness, prompted by Zuck's absurd plan to solve it by giving people AI companions. I can happily say upfront that there is academic research showing that AI companions can alleviate loneliness but less happily say that that isn't the whole story. They found they alleviate feelings of loneliness, but not loneliness itself. The thing that gets me (and you can listen to the Sidebar instead of reading it hear) is that relationships have to be reciprocal. Yes, it can feel good to have someone listen to you and respond sympathetically, to feel understood, and to feel like you have someone to turn to. But it's also an essential part of relationships that you give that to other people too. It feels good to help other people, to be relied on, to be needed. AI companions don't need you. As it happens I just glanced at my phone screen and saw this from Ted Chiang:

"No one enjoys thinking about their complicity in the injustices of the world, but it is imperative that the people who are building world-shaking technologies engage in this kind of critical self-examination. It's their willingness to look unflinchingly at their own role in the system that will determine whether AI leads to a better world of a worse one."

Related, I loved the little slap to tech CEOs in the last episode of Black Mirror (I'm probably slightly misquoting from memory): "You seem like a really nice person, but this power is not a good fit."