Intellectual Property law is a recent innovation in social policy which formalises a millennium of assumptions about who owns a thing, has authority over its dispersal, or profits from its use in the world. Given recent Large Language Model innovations, this branch of law is suddenly crucial, as it’s on the edge of defining, and defending, how things, content, stories, pictures, music and more are…
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” The famous quote, drawn from the US Declaration of Independence, is a truth sometimes applicable to nations, social groups and apparently, to software. After years of happy use, it’s time to break up with another long-used tool. Farewell Trello. It was…
What happens when truth becomes completely relative, prone to change on the flip of a few bits and bytes? Cobol the Trader, resident of Terminalstad, the capital of the Cities of the Arc, last bastion of humanity against the Wastrel, is about to find out.
The humble elevator button serves as an everyday, but interesting, example of how technology tells stories of its patterns of use. Canny designers, engineers, or makers of things pay attention to these patterns and learn from the story they tell. Those who don’t, do a disservice to these invaluable little signals, and end up making things that don’t quite work the way people need them to.
When we say a decision, message, or communication is ‘set in stone,’ we’re usually talking metaphorically; that something is immutable and unchanging. But I’ve spent twenty years thinking about a message set in literal fired clay, and what it means about the history and future of our fragile information technology.
“I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force. It has made possible the saving of institutions pretty much as they were, which otherwise might have had to be changed.” Professor Joseph Weizenbaum, 1985, MIT, “The Tech.”
“English Food” by Professor Diane Purkiss is a delightful, scholarly, and engaging tour through the history of English food. Not the stereotypically cliched image of English food, like boiled meat, flavourless mashed potatoes and over-steamed pale peas, but the rich and varied tapestry of things the English ate, extending across thousands of years of history, innovation, and cultural change.
Technology commentatorazzi risk being a one-trick pony; all aggresively negative analysis and no upside. But technology is usually a mix of the good, bad and ugly, depending on which affordances (opportunities for action) they offer. That said, some affordances shade a technology into one primary character, a little more bad than good or vice versa. If we’ve generally got a sense of what bad…
I’ve been moving towards a position that ideas, concepts, phrases and even larger social, political and economic frameworks are all a type of sociocultural technology build with intention to engineer society and culture. Whether we call them memes, story-gizmos, semiotic signals or sociocultural technologies, they shape our world, often for the worse.
That dangerous golden cup from which we sip, hoping for reward; or knowingly offer to others to gain power, but end up poisoning ourselves. Some metaphors are so effective they rebound down through time, giving us room to use them again and again to describe new moments in culture. Which makes me wonder if Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate poisoned chalice?
“What we needed to know about cars… is not how to use them but how they use us. In the case of cars, what we needed to think about in the early twentieth century was not how to drive them but what they would do to our air, our landscape, our social relations, our family life and our cities.” Neil Postman, “End of Education.”
Despite all the recent froth, conversational Large Language Models don’t imply, need, require, or suggest consciousness. They create (sometimes meaningful) outputs when our input prompts cause the models to search through huge word-fragment array tables for a matching strung-together output. It’s information, but it isn’t necessarily intelligent in the way we usually talk about intelligence. And…
My ten-year-old self lives on within me, especially when I look at the ‘classic’ 1980s and 90s era pictures of space-envisioning. Those inspiring oil, watercolour or gouache imaginings that posited what a future in space could look like. As the years have gone on, I’ve grown more aware of how technology is applied and wary of how it’s misapplied. Which makes me realise that my memories of…
It’s interesting how changes in language both affect and reflect society. This seems especially true to how we think and talk about technology. I can’t put my finger on when it happened, but suddenly, the Greek root-word ‘techne’ has spread everywhere. This simple fragment is the core of the word ‘technology,’ which means, by proxy, technology feels like it’s subsuming everything.
The recently coined, AI-induced ‘Brain Fry’, appears as a new condition; something unique to our use of Large Language Model algorithms. However, a hundred years ago people worried about ‘Brain Fever’ in overworked telegraph operators. This cycle of concern is a reminder that the history of technology might not repeat, but it rhymes like sophomoric poetry; often and awkwardly. And it’s also a…
There is no more humbling and inspiring image than the Earth alone against the darkness of space. That’s us there - the Blue Marble; a single sphere enwrapping all our trials and tribulations. It’s an image gained from an unprecedented coordination of intellect, labour and technology, but it also hides a more complex truth.
There’s a throwaway line from “Elementary,” the Sherlock Holmes homage from 2012. While questioning a witness, Holmes, as portrayed by the edgy, energetic and enquiring Jonny Lee Miller, asks a suspect, “Another line of inquiry is ‘Qui bono?’ Who benefits? AKA ’follow the money.’” I’m struck by how uncannily apropos the line is to our current socioeconomic wrestling match with the behemoth of…
There’s a lot of conversation in the ether about gatekeeping; as if the tools of the recent past restrict people’s ability to create. The argument usually follows that the most recent technology wunderkind, Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence, removes gatekeepers to creative and knowledge work. That it allows more people, more power to ideate, synthesise and produce information. Which is…
There’s something strange happening in how people perceive Large Language Models, the now pervasive sub-variant of the broader universe of experiments in Artificial Intelligence. When using these tools, there’s a risk we’re being hijacked by a type of pareidolia, our human tendency to see meaning in noise; faces in rock structures, animals in clouds and voices in static. If so, it would explain…
We’re building systems of ever more increasing hidden complexity; systems that are not visible to inspection. This applies to everyday technologies, like cars, kitchen appliances, and built infrastructure, but also to the culturally-labelled ’Artificial Intelligence’, the newest generation of controlling but opaque ‘black box’ systems that saturate our lives.