Julian Bleecker:

What Design Fiction does best is to effervesce more of what Roland Barthes called the ‘residue’ of the reality of the world. Good Design Fiction doesn’t hit you over the head with lots of didactic anchorage — exposition explaining technology, or why some techie-looking nozzle does this or does that — or overdone props like pump-action plasma rifles and over-wrought vehicles done up by self-indulgent production designers, or lots of CG lens flare. Good Design Fiction restrains itself and emphasizes a kind of relatable everyday-ness.

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Has ML and AI and all of that become so effectively normalized as a component of the everyday software ‘stack’ that not having it as part of your ‘solution’ would be as weird as a company not having a website today? What is a world where all that stuff is hygiene - just routine to where you don’t think twice about using an AI to promote your wares, evaluate and interview prospects, and talk to the algorithmically represented personalities of deceased friends and family (as Caleb does in this episode)?