Category: Culture

  • AI Eno

    My good friend Barry Taylor put me onto a site that a friend of his has created around the works of Brian Eno. The ‘Eno Bot’ is a (Not Very) Large Language Model – an AI trained on the accumulation of Eno’s writings, and coded into a chat interface. What’s interesting about this being an…

  • War Machine + the (very) narrow path to good AI

    Last week I had the pleasure of chatting to Matt Baker, of the War Machine podcast, about the book. It was a pretty rich conversation – and Matt edits up a very decent intro too! Hope you enjoy listening. I also went up to Oxford on Thursday to go to a lecture being given by…

  • Algorithm as mirror

    An interesting study out today has found that teens “prefer a social media completely customized for them, depicting what they agree with, what they want to see and, thus, who they are.” “In our qualitative interview study of teens 13-17, we found that personalized algorithmic content does seem to present what teens interpret as a…

  • Benny and the Blue Whale

    Great fun to go hear Mr Gum creator Andy Stanton talk about his new book, Benny and the Blue Whale this week. Andy is a very talented children’s writer – but so much more too, and his deep dive into language and how he used ChatGPT to create a very extraordinary story about a whale…

  • Oxford

    It was a huge privilege to be invited by Lord John Alderdice to Hamilton Manchester College last week for a 2-day workshop exploring how complexity theory interacts with conflict resolution. An incredible group of people – from theorists at the Santa Fe Institute to those with enormous experience (as John has) with conflict resolution –…

  • AI, limiting complexity and the social contract – some emerging thoughts

    Has social media led to a rise in anti-social behaviour? And, if so, does the widespread adoption of AI risk making this worse? Or is a highly-networked society one that will see community capacity deepened? Life has a habit of circling around. The first book I wrote – many, many years ago – was an…