No way! Some researchers at IBM in Brazil have looked into exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out myself… how researchers use Obsidian as a “second brain” to manage knowledge 🧠📝

arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20187

📃 in Adapting University Policies for Generative AI: Opportunities, Challenges, and Policy Solutions in Higher Education, Beale asks how do universities respond to the advent of LLMs?

There are clear benefits and risk for misuse. Which policies strike the right balance for use of AI?

They introduce the Human Agency Scale: a shared language for human-AI task relationships

H1: AI handles the task entirely on its own

H2: AI needs minimal human input

H3: Equal human-agent partnership

H4: AI needs substantial human input

H5: AI can’t function without continuous human involvement

📘 What do workers actually want AI agents to do?

A new paper from Stanford titled The Future of Work with AI Agents proposes a principled, survey-based framework to evaluate this, shifting the focus from technical capability to human desire and agency.

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Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06576

In short: Speculative tech in pop culture is a rich resource for rethinking how we design for real human needs in HCI.

Do I wish I could eat a konjac jelly and instantly understand every language instead of using an app? 100% yes.

📘 In Doraemon’s Gadget Lab, Tram Tran explores the speculative tech of the beloved Japanese manga Doraemon through an HCI lens—categorising 379 gadgets by user needs, comparing them to today’s technologies, and asking how they might inspire future interaction design paradigms.

View of the 18 guidelines and example applications as well as the full paper can be found here:
erichorvitz.com/Guidelines_H...