Citizens want greater democracy, while tourists seek out Soviet-era nostalgia, but could Russia’s war on Ukraine be the ultimate decider of country’s fate?

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In the heart of Tbilisi’s Armenian quarter, Avlabari Square is where crowds gather for the “Saturday March”. Every weekend, protesters head towards the Bridge of Love, reach Freedom Square and march towards parliament, chanting slogans against Irakli Kobakhidze’s government.

Demonstrators in Tblisi take part in the Saturday March, when pro-European parties and movements march through the historic centre to protest against the policies of the ruling Georgian Dream party, which critics accuse of being pro-Russian.

For Emergence Magazine, James Bridle writes about artificial intelligence; carpentry and chair-making with ChatGPT; and Enzo Mari, a famed Italian furniture designer from the 1950s and ’60s. Bridle asks: “What if we used AI for something actually useful?” They offer an interesting take on AI, and why the extractive way we’re using it is far from satisfying.

What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechanics of how one is put together, the physics of holding you up. But they have no embodied experience of the world, no history with chairs or any other object, no physical memory. They don’t know how it feels, not merely to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among other things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mundane business of life. This is the idea of a chair brought to life; but things—objects, beings, relationships—are not mere ideas, and you certainly can’t get every aspect of them from books. The chair is low stakes, but, once again, you wouldn’t want to run a society, or a culture, or a planet this way.