Category: Culture

  • ‘Good’ Grief?

    An interesting piece of video journalism here, taking a look at ‘Grief Tech’ and the hope that some bros in Silicon Valley are holding out that they can ‘solve’ the problem of grief and loss. It’s interesting for many reasons, not least because it presents AI (again) as a god-like force that we should turn…

  • BlueSky

    Not going to lie, it took a long time building a strong presence on Twitter, getting verified etc. But in Musk’s hands the place has become pretty awful, so I’ve started rebuilding on BlueSky. You can find my profile here: https://bsky.app/profile/kesterbrewin.bsky.social Been reflecting on making those tough tech choices, and it feels increasingly wrong to…

  • A Continental AI Strategy for Africa

    Very interesting discussion this morning with Rachel Adams from the African AI Observatory. Rachel is based in South Africa and has been a leading figure in putting together the Continential AI Strategy published just last month by the African Union. She’s written a paper about it with Ayantola Alayande here. You’ll be able to watch…

  • Greenbelt

    Very much looking forward to being back at Greenbelt Festival this year. I’m giving a talk about the new book in the main talks venue on Friday morning at 11am, followed by a book-signing in the bookshop tent. Details here. 4g mobile coverage may well be very patchy, but I’ve put together a series of…

  • Hallucination: an ancient and modern concern

    I’ve been asked a few times about how the work I did in GETTING HIGH links to the issues raised in the new book GOD-LIKE, and I wanted to answer that with some thoughts around the issue of hallucination. GETTING HIGH plots the history of the human quest for flight, mainly through the twin prisms…

  • There’s nothing we can do to stop AI stealing all our jobs! Except… urrm…

    Atlantic magazine unearthed an extraordinarily candid video interview a couple of weeks ago, in which Brian Wu – a senior engineer at OpenAI responded to a question about AI’s impact on work: ‘I guess it’s kind of deeply unfair that, like, a group of people can build AI and just take everyone’s jobs away, and,…