Hi, I'm Scott. I am associate professor of cinema and digital media and Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. I te...
A Response to Carson Gross I've been watching the videos coming out of the Software Should Work conference. They've mostly been mostly good. Carson Gross gave a talk called AI & the University . Shockingly, I have opinions . Although they're not, specifically, about AI. Instead, they're about programming pedagogy. Through a bunch of the talk, starting at about 8:30, Gross starts digging in on the…
On Technology, Systems, and Agency This year, I taught my first large undergraduate lecture course since the advent of LLMs. I reworked the assessment structure not so much to discourage use of LLMs, but rather to make their use a matter of indifference to me. (That said, I am an anti-LLM absolutist. That said, it's more important to me to not be a cop than to prevent LLM usage.) Of course, I gave…
I'm both American and Canadian. I immigrated to Canada in summer of 2016, a few months before Trump won the 2016 election (and have since become a Canadian citizen). It was a weird time to have immigrated. On the one hand, the weekend of the election, my husband and I attended a protest that passed in front of the US consulate in Toronto. We attended the Unitarian congregation in our neighbourhood…
I started writing this post in October, when Mozilla announced that it's going to become an adtech company . I got distracted by the professoring business, and didn't finish it until now. It's not quite so salient (and, uh, a lot has happened in the world since October 5). But tech, politics, and political economy aren't remotely separate spheres in 2024. So Mozilla decided it was going to become…
The research centre I run, the Centre for Culture and Technology , has its first session of a new program this evening. Computer Club is this new program, which I will be running in collaboration with Matt Nish-Lapidus . Computer Club is an outgrowth of two things: For the past two years, we've run a program called Media Arts & Studies Playtime, which was a hands-on, low-stress, informal demo…
In June, while I was visiting my parents' house on the beach in Massachusetts, Apple announced its Apple Intelligence. For the first time in a long while, I wanted to throw my Apple devices into the see. I had a very vivid picture of yeeting my barely-a-year-old, very-nearly-maxed-out M2 MacBook Pro, like a frisbee, off a cliff and into the Atlantic. For reasons I'm not entirely sure how to…