Notes from the Future’s Margin

humane semantic scaffolding for situated cognition

And then there is also…

how humans maintain continuity of meaning while remaining present inside lived environments

These are bits from convos with LLMs on further implications and through-lines of what we’ve been playing with. What’s really interesting is how older pieces speak to what’s also happening.

For example, this piece wishing there was a hardware compliment for Evernote speaks to a kind of canvas-hewn, cognitive infrastructure which really bends well away from what folks are doing or speaking to even now. The idea of malleable software which takes the cognitive capacity of the human and offers them the ability to find the threads is just… well, it’s a nuance that’s not here.

Am somewhat hopeful that Apple’s WWDC does something to enable this space a bit. In part because there’s a hope that the rumored folding iPhone/iPad would consolidate a part of the hardware stack here. But also that there’d be something more to this software experience than “prompt, extract, and mine attention.”

One says also, “imagination still runs several generations ahead of stable behavior.” And that’s true. Am retreating to writing here while deciding on how/if to twist the PWA project to also encompass a piece of a new project being taken on. In defining environments as semantically expressive spaces, am finding this work closer to the ripples/impacts of things like ambient computing, embodied cognition, post-app interaction models, and protopian design than traditional software architecture. There’s not much of a road map for this as much as there is “curiosity play.”

There’s a possible “capability mark” exploration to happen here. If it does, these notes push further still into a space that’s very much asking for characteristics of digital, ethical, and social interactions which aren’t quite here (or there isn’t quite language for, yet). These edges are very much different than what’s being discussed openly. There might be something to all of it… or just another experiment in the way of this effort.