Douglas Rushkoff wants us to use AI to ask better questions

Douglas Rushkoff, the writer and media theorist who chronicled the countercultural spirit of early ’90s online culture in books like Cyberia, hopes AI can help recapture that era’s sense of possibility.

“I feel like there’s another opportunity to kind of stop using technology on people, and for people to start using technology to realize new visions,” says Rushkoff.

He recently joined the AI consulting startup Andus Labs, where he serves as a kind of scholar-in-residence. He’s also helping produce an upcoming Andus event called After Now, which will take place on July 23 and allow both online and in-person audiences in Manhattan to share thoughts on how AI will shape the future. Speakers include musician Brian Eno, The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson, MIT scientist Nataliya Kos’myna, and investors Esther Dyson and Albert Wenger.

Thompson will speak on AI’s impact on the media and information ecosystem. Eno, who has long worked with pre-LLM generative technologies to create music and art, will join Rushkoff in a conversation about “emergence, uncertainty, and the creative power of letting go.”

Comedian Greg Barris is scheduled to demonstrate how to build a collaborative AI assistant. Entrepreneur Julia Dixon, who created the AI platform ESAI to help college applicants despite having little tech background, will discuss how no-code tools can turn “AI curiosity into scaled impact.” Dyson and Wenger will explore how AI may transform business, along with broader economic and social systems.

The event will also help Andus Labs—founded by Chris Perry, a former innovation executive at marketing agency Weber Shandwick—begin building a network of AI-focused professionals. But according to Rushkoff, it’s equally an opportunity to reflect on what the AI era should look like: not just how the technology is used, but how society and work may need to evolve alongside it.

“Rather than looking for fast answers, how do we iterate with these technologies to create new and more compelling questions?” says Rushkoff.

Already, Andus Labs is collaborating with Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, on a concept they call a “civic stack” for public AI applications. The company also plans to help corporate clients build internal AI innovation labs—spaces where small teams can explore how AI might serve their unique needs, rather than treat it as just another IT product.

“As if they’re bringing in Lotus 1-2-3,” Rushkoff says. “The idea is to go into a company and find 10 or 20 people who are willing to think and experiment in this way, and have a certain amount of their time be able to be dedicated to really thinking through what aspects of their company they want to start to interrogate and amplify with these technologies, and then working with them to hopefully develop bespoke instances.”

Andus Labs also plans to publish insights from its work, Rushkoff says, as part of a broader effort to promote what it calls “generative thinking”—not just by machines, but by humans.

“We’re trying to be to the autonomous technology age, what Bauhaus was to the industrial age,” Rushkoff says. “Bauhaus was looking at how you design industrially around the human body, and human perception, and human scale.”

Rushkoff is the author of more than a dozen books, including Survival of the Richest and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and hosts the podcast Team Human. His work often critiques techno-solutionism and the commodification of human attention, pushing instead for more humane and equitable uses of technology.

His goal with Andus is to focus on a more human-centered approach than that of traditional tech firms, which he says often see AI as merely a new domain for market expansion. He doesn’t intend to shy away from broader societal questions, including why people still need to work for a living, even as AI reshapes the economy.

“I know it sounds idealistic, but I guess what I’m saying is these apparent AI challenges can launch different kinds of conversations,” he says. “And then they suggest a different way of working with AI, which is not to accelerate the rate at which we can develop industrial age, easy solutions for problems, but rather to engage in a new style of generative thinking, [where] we iterate questions and problems with artificial intelligence.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91371661/douglas-rushkoff-wants-us-to-use-ai-to-ask-better-questions?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss