“We must build AI for people; not to be a person,” Mustafa Suleyman’s recent essay on the importance of avoiding what he terms ‘seemingly conscious AI ‘is a welcome intervention, and much better argued than his recent book, The Coming Wave. It could be argued that it’s also a good way to put some clear…| A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
At noon today, in half an hour, there will be a two minute silence to mark VJ Day, the eightieth anniversary of the surrender of Japan and the effective end of World War Two| A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
I arrived to study at Cambridge University forty-six years ago, in 1979, and moved into a room at St Catharine’s College, or Catz. It was Bull 51, a room at the top of Bull Hostel under a leaded roof, looking out over King’s Parade (the one marked in the photo above).| A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are crafting algorithmic timelines, trying to kill my ability to focus for longer than thirty seconds.| A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
I’m editing a newsletter and I just copied and pasted a photograph I took in Savino’s cafe this week of my coffee in a cup from the 2019 Venice Biennale, which I attended. And I’m listening to Laurie Anderson who is standing in for Iggy Pop on 6Music, and the second song she plays is from an opera called Sea and Sand that she saw at the Bienalle in 2019, which I remember seeing too. it was one of the pavilion exhibitions and you watched from a balcony.| A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
If you have a Netflix subscription you might have come across Toxic Town, the story of how the contaminated soil from a decommissioned steelworks in the UK led to many cases of developmental abnormalities and the birth of children with affected limbs during the 1990s. The drama focused on the efforts of a dedicated solicitor to expose the lies and deception of those involved, particularly the local council, and told the tale of some of the families most affected. It is not easy to watch, what...| A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
As I see in the new year quietly for once, I’m remembering the turn of the millennium, a mere quarter-century ago, and being on BBC One as the nation’s Millennium Bug correspondent. I spent most of the day in TC1, the main studio at BBC Television Centre in London, while an array of presenters and guests were wheeled on and off, covering the New Year celebrations from around the world. | A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
I’d like to feel that every reader of this blog gets value for money, so today I’m going to give you a real bonus and hand back the fifteen or so hours it would take to read Nexus, the latest 500 page outpuring from Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and the sort of person…| A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
Paul Simon got there first..I’m giving up ‘intelligence’ for 2024. That is, I’m not going to use the term ‘intelligence’ except to critique it as an inherently flawed construction firmly grounded in race science and unable to sustain the weight of current usage as a measure of cognitive ability that can help us assess human, animal, or machine-based capabilities. | A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It
