Digest Issue 73: How can facilitators inspire new AI tools that meaningfully serve collective dialogues? | The Best Inventions of 2025 | The Faculty are Riding Horses
Curated collection of media on the interactions between humans and technology and what it means for the future of the human-technology relationship
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For this issue, I included additional metadata for each item beyond simply the title and URL, with the use of a large language model (LLM) for the takeaways.
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Digest
Research Note: How can facilitators inspire new AI tools that meaningfully serve collective dialogues?
Date: 2025-10-23
Author: Jigsaw
Description
At Jigsaw, everyone’s a researcher pursuing innovations [in engineering, design, research and beyond] that center human agency. Our…
📣 Aiify.io & Ontology of Value: AI x Future of Work (v.3); with Fetch.ai Innovation Lab
Date: 2024-12-13
Author: TBA
The Best Inventions of 2025
Date: 2025-10-09
Author: TBA
Description
Here are the 2025 best inventions making the world better, smarter, and more fun.
The Next Great Bundling: Markets and Media
Date: 2025-10-22
Author: Mason Nystrom
Description
Let’s bet on this sh*t.
Summary
For anyone that’s ever bet on an NFL game, you immediately realize that it feels like a levered form of entertainment. This same experience, often amplified by volatility, is what has propelled prediction markets, memecoins, and the trend towards broader financialization of everything. Twitter could easily be a venue where $TICKERs have integrated purchases options or embedded sports betting within social networks powered by underlying prediction markets.
Takeaways
Takeaways:
The next significant trend is integrating media consumption and financial trading into unified platforms.
Social media networks (e.g., Twitter/X) are prime candidates for embedding direct asset purchases and betting features.
Onchain assets and developed internet capital markets are crucial enablers for this integration.
The experience of watching asset prices move, especially within social contexts, is a core form of entertainment driving engagement.
Bundling media and markets will merge the moment of attention (content consumption) with the moment of monetization (trading).
How “middle powers” can avoid being left behind in frontier AI
Date: 2025-09-21
Author: TBA
Description
While great powers like the United States and China are moving to capitalise on AI as a strategic technology.
Summary
This might lead to a world where countries need access to near-frontier capabilities that puts them far enough ahead of the AI tech curve to stave off AI-powered aggression like cyberattacks or engineered biological weapons. Recent policy writing from the US calls into question the proliferation of advanced AI capabilities even to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). They control strategic elements of the compute supply chain, from raw materials to lithography — the Netherlands with ASML and Taiwan with TSMC are the obvious examples.
Takeaways
Takeaways:
Middle powers cannot realistically compete with the US and China in developing frontier AI models themselves due to massive resource disparities.
Middle powers are highly vulnerable to being economically and strategically marginalized in an AI-dominated world order.
Relying solely on consumer markets or open-source models is insufficient and risky for middle powers seeking relevance.
The primary viable strategy for middle powers is to identify and invest in specific strategic bottlenecks (e.g., compute hardware, industrial application capacity, unique data) to create economic value and leverage.
Successfully leveraging these bottlenecks requires proactive investment and support today to secure future economic and strategic relevance against great power dominance.
The Faculty are Riding Horses
Date: 2025-10-13
Author: Hollis Robbins
Description
What the Nobel Prize Winners Might Say About That
Summary
Faculty had been designing courses assuming students would write papers over weeks, consult limited sources, visit office hours for feedback, work at the pace the syllabus specified. When I awoke this morning to finish these thoughts, I saw the news of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, which went to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt. Aghion and Howitt’s model of endogenous growth demonstrates that innovation stalls when incumbents, fearing disruption, build barriers around existing systems.
Takeaways
Takeaways:
Universities must adapt to AI technology rather than resisting it
Faculty need proper training to effectively integrate AI into education
Students’ AI fluency should be leveraged rather than punished
Administrators should invest in faculty development rather than detection tools
Innovation requires connecting established expertise with new technological fluency
Higher education risks stagnation if it fails to adapt to AI technology
governance ideology
Date: 2023-10-15
Author: Alice Maz
Description
civic virtue, the state of exception, and ai-mediated human-interpretable abstracted democracy
Summary
It remains a central question in our time, plagued by stagnation and wracked by upheaval, as we seek a way forward for our society that safeguards human values while also enabling effective action. With no legislative base of power, both Obama and Trump resorted to executive order to implement their agendas, resulting in a nightmare for anyone affected as rules toggled on and off arbitrarily as challenges, stays, and injunctions pingponged through the court system. If text is to be the universal interface, surely this model of cyborg government is a more fertile vision for a future than easier API integrations, bloodless personal assistants, and automated spam.
Takeaways
Takeaways:
Effective governance requires balancing decisiveness with constraints to avoid both stagnation and tyranny
Technology can enable more responsive and efficient governance while maintaining human oversight
Core moral principles should be distinguished from practical governance ideology
Emergency powers represent a fundamental tension between security and liberty
Virtue and civic duty may be more important than institutional design for good governance
AI tools function best as extensions of human cognition rather than replacements for human judgment
New World Order 2025: The Return of Hard Power and Soft Beliefs
Date: 2025-07-21
Author: Severin Matusek; Nick Houde; Paloma Maria
Description
Download our new memo.
Summary
The feed keeps refreshing but the packages don’t arrive; your meme coin just moonshot but the factory you work at just closed; the news gives bad vibes but the morning routine is strong. And the SOFT BELIEFS that emerge amidst these power struggles where people navigate a shifting environment through strategies like speculation, aggregation, and indexing. The roundtable call on September 10, 2025 is specifically targeted at companies, organisations and individuals who’re interested in the practical implications (communication, positioning, strategy) of the ideas presented in this memo.
Takeaways
Takeaways:
The world is experiencing a fundamental shift in power structures affecting geopolitics and reprogramming how our world operates.
Traditional cultural outputs are less influential than ideas from economics, geopolitics, and infrastructure in shaping our current reality.
People are developing new strategies (speculation, aggregation, indexing) to navigate an increasingly complex environment.
The internet is revealing the unevenness of our world rather than flattening it.
The ‘New World Order’ memo provides context and language to understand and participate in shaping the emerging world.
Physical encounters and local connections remain important despite digital advancements.
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