Partenariat Le freelancing est une voie naturelle pour nombre d’artistes et techniciens de la 3D, qu’ils viennent de l’animation, du jeu vidéo, de l’architecture ou des effets visuels. En parallèle d’une explosion des besoins en contenus visuels temp

NSO Group, compañía israelita conocida por el software espía Pegasus, deberá pagar más de 167 millones de dólares en daños punitivos a Meta por una campaña de piratería informática y difusión de malware contra usuarios de WhatsApp. Así lo ha estimad

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said. Uttered more out of exasperation than as inspiration, his remark has nevertheless attained gospel-like status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in particular a handful of tech billionaires who fancy themselves the chief architects of humanity’s future.  Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals and ambitions in the near term, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond are remarkably similar. Framed less as technological objectives and more as existential imperatives, they include aligning AI with the interests of humanity; creating an artificial superintelligence that will solve all the world’s most pressing problems; merging with that superintelligence to achieve immortality (or something close to it); establishing a permanent, self-­sustaining colony on Mars; and, ultimately, spreading out across the cosmos. While there’s a sprawling patchwork of ideas and philosophies powering these visions, three features play a central role, says Adam Becker, a science writer and astrophysicist: an unshakable certainty that technology can solve any problem, a belief in the necessity of perpetual growth, and a quasi-religious obsession with transcending our physical and biological limits. In his timely new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Becker calls this triumvirate of beliefs the “ideology of technological salvation” and warns that tech titans are using it to steer humanity in a dangerous direction.  “In most of these isms you’ll find the idea of escape and transcendence, as well as the promise of an amazing future, full of unimaginable wonders—so long as we don’t get in the way of technological progress.” “The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more—to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, [and] to justify nearly any action they might want to take,” he writes. Becker argues that the only way to break free of these visions is to see them for what they are: a convenient excuse to continue destroying the environment, skirt regulations, amass more power and control, and dismiss the very real problems of today to focus on the imagined ones of tomorrow.  A lot of critics, academics, and journalists have tried to define or distill the Silicon Valley ethos over the years. There was the “Californian Ideology” in the mid-’90s, the “Move fast and break things” era of the early 2000s, and more recently the “Libertarianism for me, feudalism for thee”  or “techno-­authoritarian” views. How do you see the “ideology of technological salvation” fitting in?  I’d say it’s very much of a piece with those earlier attempts to describe the Silicon Valley mindset. I mean, you can draw a pretty straight line from Max More’s principles of transhumanism in the ’90s to the Californian Ideology [a mashup of countercultural, libertarian, and neoliberal values] and through to what I call the ideology of technological salvation. The fact is, many of the ideas that define or animate Silicon Valley thinking have never been much of a ­mystery—libertarianism, an antipathy toward the government and regulation, the boundless faith in technology, the obsession with optimization.  What can be difficult is to parse where all these ideas come from and how they fit together—or if they fit together at all. I came up with the ideology of technological salvation as a way to name and give shape to a group of interrelated concepts and philosophies that can seem sprawling and ill-defined at first, but that actually sit at the center of a worldview shared by venture capitalists, executives, and other thought leaders in the tech industry.  Readers will likely be familiar with the tech billionaires featured in your book and at least some of their ambitions. I’m guessing they’ll be less familiar with the various “isms” that you argue have influenced or guided their thinking. Effective altruism, rationalism, long­termism, extropianism, effective accelerationism, futurism, singularitarianism, ­transhumanism—there are a lot of them. Is there something that they all share?  They’re definitely connected. In a sense, you could say they’re all versions or instantiations of the ideology of technological salvation, but there are also some very deep historical connections between the people in these groups and their aims and beliefs. The Extropians in the late ’80s believed in self-­transformation through technology and freedom from limitations of any kind—ideas that Ray Kurzweil eventually helped popularize and legitimize for a larger audience with the Singularity.  In most of these isms you’ll find the idea of escape and transcendence, as well as the promise of an amazing future, full of unimaginable wonders—so long as we don’t get in the way of technological progress. I should say that AI researcher Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile Torres have also done a lot of great work linking these ideologies to one another and showing how they all have ties to racism, misogyny, and eugenics. You argue that the Singularity is the purest expression of the ideology of technological salvation. How so? Well, for one thing, it’s just this very simple, straightforward idea—the Singularity is coming and will occur when we merge our brains with the cloud and expand our intelligence a millionfold. This will then deepen our awareness and consciousness and everything will be amazing. In many ways, it’s a fantastical vision of a perfect technological utopia. We’re all going to live as long as we want in an eternal paradise, watched over by machines of loving grace, and everything will just get exponentially better forever. The end. The other isms I talk about in the book have a little more … heft isn’t the right word—they just have more stuff going on. There’s more to them, right? The rationalists and the effective altruists and the longtermists—they think that something like a singularity will happen, or could happen, but that there’s this really big danger between where we are now and that potential event. We have to address the fact that an all-powerful AI might destroy humanity—the so-called alignment problem—before any singularity can happen.  Then you’ve got the effective accelerationists, who are more like Kurzweil, but they’ve got more of a tech-bro spin on things. They’ve taken some of the older transhumanist ideas from the Singularity and updated them for startup culture. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” [from 2023] is a good example. You could argue that all of these other philosophies that have gained purchase in Silicon Valley are just twists on Kurzweil’s Singularity, each one building on top of the core ideas of transcendence, techno­-optimism, and exponential growth.  Early on in the book you take aim at that idea of exponential growth—specifically, Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Could you explain what that is and why you think it’s flawed? Kurzweil thinks there’s this immutable “Law of Accelerating Returns” at work in the affairs of the universe, especially when it comes to technology. It’s the idea that technological progress isn’t linear but exponential. Advancements in one technology fuel even more rapid advancements in the future, which in turn lead to greater complexity and greater technological power, and on and on. This is just a mistake. Kurzweil uses the Law of Accelerating Returns to explain why the Singularity is inevitable, but to be clear, he’s far from the only one who believes in this so-called law. “I really believe that when you get as rich as some of these guys are, you can just do things that seem like thinking and no one is really going to correct you or tell you things you don’t want to hear.” My sense is that it’s an idea that comes from staring at Moore’s Law for too long. Moore’s Law is of course the famous prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every two years, with a minimal increase in cost. Now, that has in fact happened for the last 50 years or so, but not because of some fundamental law in the universe. It’s because the tech industry made a choice and some very sizable investments to make it happen. Moore’s Law was ultimately this really interesting observation or projection of a historical trend, but even Gordon Moore [who first articulated it] knew that it wouldn’t and couldn’t last forever. In fact, some think it’s already over.  These ideologies take inspiration from some pretty unsavory characters. Transhumanism, you say, was first popularized by the eugenicist Julian Huxley in a speech in 1951. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” name-checks the noted fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his futurist manifesto. Did you get the sense while researching the book that the tech titans who champion these ideas understand their dangerous origins? You’re assuming in the framing of that question that there’s any rigorous thought going on here at all. As I say in the book, Andreessen’s manifesto runs almost entirely on vibes, not logic. I think someone may have told him about the futurist manifesto at some point, and he just sort of liked the general vibe, which is why he paraphrases a part of it. Maybe he learned something about Marinetti and forgot it. Maybe he didn’t care.  I really believe that when you get as rich as some of these guys are, you can just do things that seem like thinking and no one is really going to correct you or tell you things you don’t want to hear. For many of these billionaires, the vibes of fascism, authoritarianism, and colonialism are attractive because they’re fundamentally about creating a fantasy of control.  You argue that these visions of the future are being used to hasten environmental destruction, increase authoritarianism, and exacerbate inequalities. You also admit that they appeal to lots of people who aren’t billionaires. Why do you think that is?  I think a lot of us are also attracted to these ideas for the same reasons the tech billionaires are—they offer this fantasy of knowing what the future holds, of transcending death, and a sense that someone or something out there is in control. It’s hard to overstate how comforting a simple, coherent narrative can be in an increasingly complex and fast-moving world. This is of course what religion offers for many of us, and I don’t think it’s an accident that a sizable number of people in the rationalist and effective altruist communities are actually ex-evangelicals. More than any one specific technology, it seems like the most consequential thing these billionaires have invented is a sense of inevitability—that their visions for the future are somehow predestined. How does one fight against that? It’s a difficult question. For me, the answer was to write this book. I guess I’d also say this: Silicon Valley enjoyed well over a decade with little to no pushback on anything. That’s definitely a big part of how we ended up in this mess. There was no regulation, very little critical coverage in the press, and a lot of self-mythologizing going on. Things have started to change, especially as the social and environmental damage that tech companies and industry leaders have helped facilitate has become more clear. That understanding is an essential part of deflating the power of these tech billionaires and breaking free of their visions. When we understand that these dreams of the future are actually nightmares for the rest of us, I think you’ll see that senseof inevitability vanish pretty fast.  This interview was edited for length and clarity. Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California. 

12 June, 2025 In our turning points series, design studios share some of the key moments that shaped their business. This week, we meet Accept & Proceed. Accept & Proceed is a London based brand and design studio that works with clients like NASA, Nike and LEGO. Founder David Johnston talks us through some of the decisions that defined his business. In 2006, Johnston took the leap to start his own business, armed with a good name and a willingness to bend the truth about his team… I’d gone through my career learning from big organisations, and one small organisation, and I felt like I wasn’t happy where I was. It was my dad who encouraged me to take a leap of faith and try and go it alone. With nothing more than a month’s wages in the bank and a lot of energy, I decided to go and set up an agency. That really just means giving yourself a name and starting to promote yourself in the world. Accept & Proceed founder David Johnston I think the name itself is a very important thing. I wanted something that was memorable but also layered in meaning. A name that starts with an “a” is very beneficial when you’re being listed in the index of books and things like that. But it became a bit of a compass for the way that we wanted to create work, around accepting the status quo for what it is, but with a continual commitment to proceed nonetheless. Because I didn’t have anyone to work with, in those early months I just made up email addresses of people that didn’t exist. That allowed me to cost projects up for multiple people. That’s obviously a degree of hustle I wouldn’t encourage in everyone, but it meant I was able to charge multiple day rates for projects where I was playing the role of four or five people. Self-initiated projects have long been part of the studio’s DNA and played a key role in building key client relationships. A&P by… was a brief to explore these letterforms without any commercial intent apart from the joy of creative expression. I started reaching out to illustrators and artists and photographers and designers that I really rated, and the things that started coming back were incredible. I was overwhelmed by the amount of energy and passion that people like Mr Bingo and Jason Evans were bringing to this. I think in so many ways, the answer to everything is community. I’ve gone on to work with a lot of the people that created these, and they also became friends. It was an early example of dissolving these illusionary boundaries around what an agency might be, but also expanding and amplifying your potential. The first of Accept & Proceed’s Light Calendars Then in 2006, I was trying to establish our portfolio and I wanted something to send out into the world that would also be an example of how Accept & Proceed thinks about design. I landed on these data visualisations that show the amount of light and darkness that would happen in London in the year ahead. I worked with a freelance designer called Stephen Heath on the first one – he is now our creative director. This kickstarted a 10-year exploration, and they became a rite of passage for new designers that came into the studio, to take that very similar data and express it in completely new ways. It culminated in an exhibition in London in 2016, showing ten years’ of prints. They were a labour of love, but they also meant that every single year we had a number of prints that we could send out to new potential contacts. Still when I go to the global headquarters of Nike in Beaverton in Portland, I’m amazed at how many of these sit in leaders’ offices there. When we first got a finance director, they couldn’t believe how much we’d invested as a business in things like this – we even had our own gallery for a while. It doesn’t make sense from a purely numbers mindset, but if you put things out there for authentic reasons, there are ripple effects over time. In 2017, the studio became a B-corp, the fourth creative agency in the UK to get this accreditation. Around 2016, I couldn’t help but look around – as we probably all have at varying points over the last 10 years – and wondered, what the fuck is going on? All these systems are not fit for purpose for the future – financial systems, food systems, relationship systems, energy systems. They’re not working. And I was like shit, are we part of the problem? Accept & Proceed’s work for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory I’ve always thought of brand as a piece of technology that can fundamentally change our actions and the world around us. That comes with a huge responsibility. We probably paid four months’ wages of two people full-time just to get accredited, so it’s quite a high bar. But I like that the programme shackles you to this idea of improvement. You can’t rest on your laurels if you want to be re-accredited. It’s like the way design works as an iterative process – you have to keep getting better. In 2019, Johnston and his team started thinking seriously about the studio’s own brand, and created a punchy, nuanced new positioning. We got to a point where we’d proven we could help brands achieve their commercial aims. But we wanted to hold a position ourselves, not just be a conduit between a brand and its audience. It still amazes me that so few agencies actually stand for anything. We realised that all the things – vision, mission, principles – that we’ve been creating for brands for years, we hadn’t done for ourselves. It’s a bit like when you see a hairdresser with a really dodgy haircut. But it’s hard to cut your own hair. So we went through that process, which was really difficult, and we landed on “Design for the future” as our promise to the world. And if you’re going to have that as a promise, you better be able to describe the world you’re creating through your work, which we call “the together world.” Accept & Proceed’s work for Second Sea We stand at this most incredible moment in history where the latest technology and science is catching up with ancient wisdom, to know that we must become more entangled, more together, more whole. And we’ve assessed five global shifts that are happening in order to be able to take us towards a more together world through our work – interbeing, reciprocity, healing, resilience and liberation. The year before last, we lost three global rebrand projects based on our positioning. Every one of them said to me, “You’re right but we’re not ready.” But this year, I think the product market fit of what we’ve been saying for the last five years is really starting to mesh. We’re working with Arc’teryx on their 2030 landscape, evolving Nike’s move to zero, and working with LEGO on what their next 100 years might look like, which is mind-boggling work. I don’t think we could have won any of those opportunities had we not been talking for quite a long time about design for the future. In 2023, Johnston started a sunrise gathering on Hackney Marshes, which became a very significant part of his life. I had the flu and I had a vision in my dreamy fluey state of a particular spot on Hackney Marshes where people were gathering and watching the sunrise. I happened to tell my friend, the poet Thomas Sharp this, and he said, “That’s a premonition. You have to make it happen.” The first year there were five of us – this year there were 300 people for the spring equinox in March. I don’t fully know what these gatherings will lead to. Will Accept & Proceed start to introduce the seasons to the way we operate as a business? It’s a thought I’ve had percolating, but I don’t know. Will it be something else? One of the 2024 sunrise gatherings organised by Accept & Proceed founder David Johnston I do know that there’s major learnings around authentic community building for brands. We should do away with these buckets we put people into, of age group and location. They aren’t very true. It’s fascinating to see the breadth of people who come to these gatherings. Me and Laura were thinking at some point of moving out of London, but I think these sunrise gatherings are now my reason to stay. It’s the thing I didn’t know I needed until I had it. They have made London complete for me. There’s something so ancient about watching our star rise, and the reminder that we are actually just animals crawling upon the surface of a planet of mud. That’s what’s real. But it can be hard to remember that when you’re sitting at your computer in the studio. These gatherings help me better understand creativity’s true potential, for brands, for the world, and for us. Design disciplines in this article Brands in this article What to read next Features Turning Points: Cultural branding agency EDIT Brand Identity 20 Nov, 2024

Bungie’s Marathon is still coming out, and when it does, PlayStation plans on giving the extraction shooter a fair shot. During a recent investor interview, Sony Interactive Entertainment head Herman Hulst assured the game would come out before March 31, 2026, when Sony’s fiscal year ends. Touching on its recent alpha test, he descbied the feedback as “varied, but super useful. […] The constant testing, the constant re-validation of assumptions that we just talked about, to me is just so valuable to iterate and to constantly improve the title, so when launch comes, we’re going to give the title the optimal chance of success.” Hanging over PlayStation is 2024’s sci-fi shooter Concord, which shut down weeks after launch and later led to developer Firewalk Studios closing down. That’s been just one of several botched attempts from PlayStation’s attempts to enter live-service games, which includes several canceled projects and layoffs across its first-party studios. While acknowledging these “unique challenges” and attributing Concord’s failure to the “hypercompetitive market” of hero shooters, Hulst talked up how they’re avoiding the same mistakes with Marathon. “It’s going to be the first new Bungie title in over a decade, and it’s our goal to release a very bold, very innovative, and deeply engaging title. We’re monitoring the closed alpha cycle the team has just gone through. We’re taking all the lessons learned, we’re using the capabilities we’ve built and analytics and user testing to understand how audiences are engaging with the title.” One thing Hulst didn’t touch on, though, was the recent accusations of art plagiarism levvied against Bungie. In May, artist Fern “Antireal” Hook released evidence alleging the studio stole assets she made from previous work and failed to credit her. After investigating, Bungie attributed the theft to the work of a former employee, publicly apologized, and said it would do “everything we can to make this right” with Hook. It also promised to review all in-game assets and replace “questionably sourced” art with original, in-house work. With the mention of its arriving before the fiscal year ends, Marathon may be delayed out of its current September 23 launch. At time of writing, Bungie and PlayStation have kept mum on a potential delay, but the game failed to make an appearance at PlayStation’s recent State of Play in early June. [via IGN] Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Until Death Silent Hill revival is far from over, with the original 1999 cult classic finally being remade After a stellar success with the Silent Hill 2 Remake, Bloober Team and Konami are working together to make a remake of the original game a nightmarish reality. Image credit: Konami/Bloober Team News by Kelsey Raynor Guides Writer Published on June 13, 2025 Off the back of the success of the Silent Hill 2 Remake – a remake that blew my initial low expectations out of the water completely – Konami has announced that it is working with Bloober Team once more to remake the original Silent Hill from 1999. We don’t yet have a release window, however, with the game being announced as ‘in development’ from Bloober Team and Konami, with no additional details. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. This reveal isn’t exactly surprising, given that Bloober Team announced it would be working with the publisher again in future not long after Silent Hill 2 Remake’s release. This led many, including myself, to believe that remakes of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 would be on the cards. After all, Bloober Team did such a good job of faithfully remaking Silent Hill 2, so it would be a damned shame to not give the studio another shot at remaking more cult classic entries in the series. Fortunately, it’s clear that Konami has thought the same, and Silent Hill fans can now look forward to returning to the foggy, disturbing town of Silent Hill once more. Rather than being introduced to James Sunderland and his less-than-pleasant trauma surrounding his late wife, Silent Hill puts players into the shoes of single father Harry Mason as he and his adopted daughter set off on holiday to the town, in an attempt to seek some respite after the passing of Harry’s wife. Ok, that might seem a little similar to Silent Hill 2, but hear me out. On the way to Silent Hill, Harry and Cheryl wind up in a car crash, and when Harry wakes up, his daughter is nowhere to be found. The story then ensues with Harry desperately trying to find his daughter and meeting all manner of terrifying creatures and kooky characters along the way. This still sounds similar to Silent Hill 2, but believe me, there’s a lot more going on here than the likes of Harry Mason’s psyche that I dare not spoil for folk whose first experience of the story will be this remake. Bloober Team has its work cut out for it remaking yet another Silent Hill game. It’s a lot of pressure to be put on any developer’s shoulders. That said, after just how well Silent Hill 2 was executed and how much well-deserved praise it garnered, I personally have pretty high hopes for anything Silent Hill that has Bloober’s name attached to it. What do you think?

Graduate Student Develops an A.I.-Based Approach to Restore Time-Damaged Artwork to Its Former Glory The method could help bring countless old paintings, currently stored in the back rooms of galleries with limited conservation budgets, to light Scans of the painting retouched with a new technique during various stages in the process. On the right is the restored painting with the applied laminate mask. Courtesy of the researchers via MIT In a contest for jobs requiring the most patience, art restoration might take first place. Traditionally, conservators restore paintings by recreating the artwork’s exact colors to fill in the damage, one spot at a time. Even with the help of X-ray imaging and pigment analyses, several parts of the expensive process, such as the cleaning and retouching, are done by hand, as noted by Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. Now, a mechanical engineering graduate student at MIT has developed an artificial intelligence-based approach that can achieve a faithful restoration in just hours—instead of months of work. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Alex Kachkine describes a new method that applies digital restorations to paintings by placing a thin film on top. If the approach becomes widespread, it could make art restoration more accessible and help bring countless damaged paintings, currently stored in the back rooms of galleries with limited conservation budgets, back to light. The new technique “is a restoration process that saves a lot of time and money, while also being reversible, which some people feel is really important to preserving the underlying character of a piece,” Kachkine tells Nature’s Amanda Heidt. Meet the engineer who invented an AI-powered way to restore art Watch on While filling in damaged areas of a painting would seem like a logical solution to many people, direct retouching raises ethical concerns for modern conservators. That’s because an artwork’s damage is part of its history, and retouching might detract from the painter’s original vision. “For example, instead of removing flaking paint and retouching the painting, a conservator might try to fix the loose paint particles to their original places,” writes Hartmut Kutzke, a chemist at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History, for Nature News and Views. If retouching is absolutely necessary, he adds, it should be reversible. As such, some institutions have started restoring artwork virtually and presenting the restoration next to the untouched, physical version. Many art lovers might argue, however, that a digital restoration printed out or displayed on a screen doesn’t quite compare to seeing the original painting in its full glory. That’s where Kachkine, who is also an art collector and amateur conservator, comes in. The MIT student has developed a way to apply digital restorations onto a damaged painting. In short, the approach involves using pre-existing A.I. tools to create a digital version of what the freshly painted artwork would have looked like. Based on this reconstruction, Kachkine’s new software assembles a map of the retouches, and their exact colors, necessary to fill the gaps present in the painting today. The map is then printed onto two layers of thin, transparent polymer film—one with colored retouches and one with the same pattern in white—that attach to the painting with conventional varnish. This “mask” aligns the retouches with the gaps while leaving the rest of the artwork visible. “In order to fully reproduce color, you need both white and color ink to get the full spectrum,” Kachkine explains in an MIT statement. “If those two layers are misaligned, that’s very easy to see. So, I also developed a few computational tools, based on what we know of human color perception, to determine how small of a region we can practically align and restore.” The method’s magic lies in the fact that the mask is removable, and the digital file provides a record of the modifications for future conservators to study. Kachkine demonstrated the approach on a 15th-century oil painting in dire need of restoration, by a Dutch artist whose name is now unknown. The retouches were generated by matching the surrounding color, replicating similar patterns visible elsewhere in the painting or copying the artist’s style in other paintings, per Nature News and Views. Overall, the painting’s 5,612 damaged regions were filled with 57,314 different colors in 3.5 hours—66 hours faster than traditional methods would have likely taken. Overview of Physically-Applied Digital Restoration Watch on “It followed years of effort to try to get the method working,” Kachkine tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample. “There was a fair bit of relief that finally this method was able to reconstruct and stitch together the surviving parts of the painting.” The new process still poses ethical considerations, such as whether the applied film disrupts the viewing experience or whether A.I.-generated corrections to the painting are accurate. Additionally, Kutzke writes for Nature News and Views that the effect of the varnish on the painting should be studied more deeply. Still, Kachkine says this technique could help address the large number of damaged artworks that live in storage rooms. “This approach grants greatly increased foresight and flexibility to conservators,” per the study, “enabling the restoration of countless damaged paintings deemed unworthy of high conservation budgets.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.