NeuraFutures or the Next User Interface is Your Brain Join us at @woburnlibrary on October 3, 2026 to learn more about the NeuraFutures exhibit and try out some brain-computer interfaces for yourself!

In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, prisoners chained to a wall perceive only shadows—and mistake them for reality. We extend this concept: a shadow man, controlled by an LLM, exists in 2D and perceives only silhouettes. His singular goal is to turn off the light that defines his existence. Users place objects in his path; he kicks them away. The cycle repeats. This mirrors the perceptual limits of AI. An LLM cannot see—it reads descriptions of sight. It processes language about the world without directly accessing the world itself. The shadow man embodies this gap. Both are confined to representations. The piece is a meditation on AI as cave-dweller—processing patterns without grasping the higher-dimensional reality that casts them.

1/ How are people really using AI? Today, researchers across @MIT, @Stanford, + 12 academic institutions are launching the Public AI Observatory: public infrastructure for measuring how people actually use AI assistants in the wild. 🔗 ai-observatory.org/ 📜 dataprovenance.org/ai_observ…