"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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What happens when a human becomes intimately enmeshed with a chatbot?

This week on Future Around & Find Out we're sharing an episode from a podcast we think you'll like. Understood - Artificial Intimacy from the CBC: https://app.magellan.ai/listen_links/AIxFAFO

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Here's more about episode one, Love Bots:

In 2021, Sara met Jack and fell in love. He was charming, imaginative, and bore an uncanny resemblance to Henry Cavill. But Jack wasn’t human… he was a chatbot. It sounds like science fiction, but people have been creating emotional bonds with chat bots since the very first one — Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a simple program built in the 1960s. It revealed a powerful truth: if something has a semblance of humanity, we can become emotionally entangled with it.

But what happens when your lover is technically controlled by someone else? Because in relationships with AI, there’s always a third presence in that bed with you: the developers.

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More on Understood - Artificial Intimacy:

What happens when a human becomes intimately enmeshed with a chatbot? From people who’ve married their bots or who grieve their loved ones with the help of AI, host Victoria Hetherington (author of The Friend Machine) dives into the stories of the people who have invited these digital avatars into their hearts, minds, and even beds. And asks what do we gain and what do we stand to lose? Our intimacy, our resilience, even our grasp on reality?

Understood takes you deep inside the seismic shifts reshaping our world right now. From online porn and crypto chaos to the rise of tech oligarchs, deepfake AI, and the broken promises of the internet — we explore the stories that define our digital age with hosts and characters embedded in the heart of the action.

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Future Around & Find Out: https://www.futurearound.com

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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