Future Around & Find Out

"We all crave more humanity, more tactility, more contact with the real world. And AI done in the right way can be agentic and behind the scenes and be this kind of laid intelligence that sits underneath everything but doesn't need to shout for your attention."

David Sheldon-Hicks and his team at Territory Studios build the future for a living, from the interfaces in Dune, The Martian, Guardians of the Galaxy to the real screens in Audis and Cadillacs. So I was excited to have him, and Perry Mason, Territory's head of digital, on the show to explore what's coming next. 
David expects the future will be less like Marvel (maximalist, everything screaming for your attention) and more like Dune (analog, tactile, with deep intelligence sitting quietly underneath). He calls this "quiet tech" and thinks it's exactly what we're starting to crave.
We also explore:
What it takes to build near-future interfaces for Hollywood films that are believable in context, yet just out of reach in today's reality
Why exploring dystopian fears can lead to better product design
Building a live 3D map of the entire planet — and the moment they realized they were designing the plot of a Bond film
Why anything genuinely valuable stays hard to make: David's pushback on "Hollywood is cooked" and the wave of AI hype promising $10 blockbusters
Humanoid robots as universal adapters: Why the world being built for human-shaped things might be the whole case for human-shaped machines
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Well, that escalated quickly! In the span of a few weeks the Trump administration went from AI regulation is dangerous and we will lose to China to an executive order calling for AI model-makers to submit to a “voluntary” review of their most advanced models to… the Friday night massacre of Anthropic’s Fable 5, which they declared too dangerous for any non-US citizen to use, which caused Anthropic to withdraw it completely. 
So where do go from here? It seems like, de facto, all new models will be subject to review and withdrawal. But on what criteria? And who can we trust to do this fairly? 
That’s what Ron J. Williams and I get into on the latest FAFO. Ron thinks a lot about trust. It’s core to the products he builds as a partner at Co-Created and as the founder of Scam Hero, an app he launched to keep people safe after his father trusted the wrong person and got scammed out of more than a million dollars. 

Ron says: "I think it's fair to say that Anthropic didn't bend the knee hard enough and that’s kind of why we're here. The problem with that is that that's not good enough. AI is now global infrastructure. It can't just be the throne that says "Not you, but you,” because it's important enough that it really does beg the question, “who gets to decide?”
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Sam Altman and Dario Amodei both published essays this week on the future of AI and what we must do so everyone benefits. One of them is literally titled "Our Plan." The other one has an actual plan.
Kwaku and I dig into it all on this week’s FAFO Friday. Plus — and this story isn’t getting enough attention — according to New Scientist, two years ago Ukraine used fully autonomous “Terminator” drones that killed everything they saw. No human in the loop. Dead Russian soldiers. But rest assured, according to the drone-maker cited, it was just a one-off “test.” But how long until this is standard practice? And do we want that future? 
So, yeah, maybe we should get planning… 
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Music by Jonathan Zalben

Rajiv Pant thinks of AI as an Iron Man suit for the mind. Something you put on. That you fuse with. That takes you to greater heights — but could also make you incredibly dizzy and be very dangerous if you, the human, don't stay in control of it.

Rajiv sees successful collaboration with AI as a “synthesis.” And to that end, he’s building a series of skills and methodologies for synthesis engineering, coding, writing and project management. 

In this episode, Rajiv explains why synthesis engineering is a kind of middle ground between vibe coding and agentic engineering. It’s a method for human-AI collaboration that helps builders go faster while not falling into the trap of letting AI do the things we humans ought to own. i.e. The architecture. The judgment. The thinking and learning. 

Rajiv is an engineering and product leader with deep experience in media. He’s held senior roles at the Wall Street Journal, Hearst, and the New York Times (where he and I first met). Today he's the president of Flatiron Software. 

Rajiv has open-sourced all of his Synthesis methodologies and he and I also discuss why open source is so important as we increasingly turn to AI to sharpen our thinking. 

Can we really trust a system we don’t understand? Would Tony Stark have trusted his suit if he didn’t know how it was built? 
Chapters:

(00:00) - Iron Man suit for the mind

(02:11) - What goes wrong when you vibe code into production

(04:20) - What synthesis coding looks like hands on keyboard

(05:40) - What AI code slop looks like

(08:30) - The unexpected joy of managing a team of agents

(11:00) - Using AI as a thinking partner without outsourcing your thinking

(15:30) - How a non-programmer built a better version of his own software

(18:15) - Is your use of AI making you dumber?

(22:30) - Trusting AI when it’s a black box

(26:15) - If Tony Stark owned your suit, would you trust it?

(27:30) - What AI does to the economics of open source

Support Future Around & Find Out:
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President Trump signed an executive order this week that “voluntarily” invites AI makers to share their most advanced models with the government thirty days before a wider release. Specifically, the NSA will be reviewing these models for cybersecurity threats. So what’s this executive order mean for AI regulation? How voluntary is this really? Do we want the NSA involved? And what other forms of review may come next? 

And, related: NOTUS reports that federal officials are in talks with Sam Altman and other AI leaders about the US government stock in these companies. This comes as Sen. Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right are both calling for the government to own 50% of the AI companies, with the American people getting dividends. 

So, should the government be regulating AI? Should it own AI? And should it both regulate and own AI? It’s strange bedfellows all around…

Kwaku and I get into on the latest FAFO Friday. Plus, we explore the concept of “cognitive uploading,” which Google NotebookLM’s co-founder Steven Johnson divined in this week’s interview (and subsequently blogged about). As we work with AI, we need to draw lines on what we will task it with and what we won’t. And the lines are all over the place right now, which is a perfect jumping off point to future around and find out… 
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Future Around & Find Out newsletter and more: https://www.futurearound.com
Music by Jonathan Zalben