Category: Current Affairs
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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…
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On your bike (for Gaza)
At the end of May I’m doing the Ride London 100-mile bike ride in aid of Amos Trust. I’ve supported Amos for decades, and been with them to visit Israel and Palestine – including Gaza – a couple of times. Their work is wonderful. Wonder if you’d consider sponsoring me, via JustGiving? The money will…
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God-like in The Guardian
Really thrilled to have been commissioned by The Guardian to write a piece on the book – which they published today. It explores the AI Transparency Statement that the book begins with – something that I felt I had to write as a declaration, as so many people were asking me if I’d used generative AI to write the…
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Wikipedia for Women (and why AI desperately needs it)
‘Unsurprisingly, I got stuck on Vatican City.’ Interesting piece yesterday in the news about Lucy Moore – a UK academic archaeologist and curator – who has completed a project creating a Wikipedia page for a woman in every country in the world. “She has now written biographies of 532 women since 2019, when she first…
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“You’ve got to ask yourself, would you risk brain surgery just to be able to order a pizza on your phone?”
You’ll probably have seen the news this week: Musk’s company Neuralink have implanted their chips in humans for the first time, and the patient is apparently doing fine, with the chip managing to read neuron spikes with some success. Typically for him, there’s a lot of marketing hype and not a lot of detail… and…
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Harry Potter and the Death of the Hallowed
In celebration of 20 years since the first Harry Potter book was published, I thought it’d be a good chance to look back to one of my own offerings in which I offered a radical reading of Potter’s relationship to his magical art. During a short speaking tour on Mutiny in the US with Peter Rollins,…