Surprised by serendipity

To celebrate the two-year anniversary of The Future of being Human , a new "serendipity" button, a way to continue the conversation using AI, and a roundup of the substack by the numbers

Image: Midjourney

It’s hard to believe that The Future of Being Human newsletter/Substack launched just over two years ago.

To mark the occasion I thought I’d take a break from the usual reflections on tech, society, and the future, and instead focus on how the newsletter’s doing — along with a couple of new features/resources (including a nifty “Prompt 2 URL” app that lets you create a web link to a prompt in ChatGPT or Perplexity).

The Future of Being Human by the numbers

I established The Future of being Human in early 2023 as a new platform for my writing around technology, society and the future. I’ve been writing regularly for online platforms since 2007, but I was looking for a fresh outlet as we built out Arizona State University’s Future of being Human initiative. And I specifically wanted a platform that we could leverage to scale the reach and impact of the initiative.

Like many academics who focus on public writing, my aims have always been threefold:

• Making emerging research and insights (including mine) as accessible as possible to as many people as possible;

• Using writing as a discipled way to stay on top of new developments while developing and extend my own thinking; And

• Honing my communication skills.

With The Future of Being Human Substack, I have focused on drawing on my own work and expertise as well as that of others as I explore and share emerging thinking and understanding around the complex, subtle, and sometimes no-so-subtle ways that emerging and advanced technologies impact our lives and our futures — and even what it means to be human.

The first official post on the Substack appeared on April 3, 2023, and attracted a whopping 202 views from a handful of subscribers.

Of course, building a community takes time. And since then both the number of people subscribing to the newsletter and the views have risen steadily.

As of today, over 4,500 people follow or subscribe to The Future of Being Human, and there are typically between 30,000 - 40,000 views a month. These come from across 49 states (for some reason there and no subscribers in Mississippi), and 116 countries (I’m still waiting for my first subscriber from Greenland!).

These are still low compared to what I’d like t see, but they nevertheless indicate that the newsletter is beginning to have reach at scale.

This reach includes over 220 articles over the past two years (representing over 400,000 views), with top articles typically receiving around 5,000 - 10,000 views each. Not as high as my occasional pieces on leading news platforms, but comparable with a number of my articles in places like The Conversation.

While low, these numbers are encouraging enough to signal that the time spent writing for the Substack is worth it. But I’m always looking for new ways to connect with readers, and so I thought I’d use this two-year anniversary to introduce a couple of new things …

A Serendipity button for unexpected insights

One of the challenges of writing for a newsletter like The Future of Being Human is that past articles rarely get seen and read — even though they’re all available and discoverable on the website.

And so I thought I’d make it easier to explore (and be randomly intrigued and delighted by) the Future of Being Human archives by introduce a “serendipity” button!

The button randomly transports you to an article from the past two years — give it a try, and see what you discover!

(There’s also an equivalent link in the Substack’s menu bar.)

Continuing the conversation with AI

Looking forward to the next two years of the Substack, I’ve been interested in how AI can be used to enhance the reading experience — and add yet another layer of serendipity.

This isn’t easy within the constraints of writing on Substack, but I have started to experiment with adding buttons to articles that allow for further discovery and discussion in either ChatGPT or Perplexity.

These buttons have appeared in recent articles, and allow readers to generate top takeways using Perplexity (if they don’t have time to read the whole thing), or generate a summary and ideas for further reading using ChatGPT.

You can get a sense of how these are being used in the recent post on de-extinction.

And while this post isn’t that exciting from an AI-enhanced experience, here’s an example of the type of link I’ll be using:

This is still somewhat experimental, so please do let me know how useful it is!

Converting prompts to URLs

Finally, if you’re interested in converting ChatGPT or Perplexity prompts into web links that you can share with others — which is essentially what the button above uses — I created a nifty web page that allows you to do just this:

Check it out if you’re interested (you can find the code on GitHub). I created this to generate buttons like the one above, but have been so delighted by the website (that serendipity again) that I thought it worth sharing 😊

It’s also yet another good example of how AI can accelerate the creative process when it comes to coding and website creation — this was spun up simply by giving ChatGPT a mockup of what I’d like the website to look like, and a description of what I wanted it to do. And while there was some iterative back and forth, it still amazes me how fast and easy “vibe coding” with AI is!

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That’s it for this two year roundup. Back to more substantive content next week. But in the meantime, thank you as always for your support for the Substack, and looking forward to the next two years!