Category: Economics
-
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…
-
Which AI type are you? (and would you mind writing a review?)
I was delivering some training for business leaders wanting to be leaders on responsible AI adoption a week or two back, and my excellent colleague began with a discussion question on AI personality types. Consider the ice well and truly broken: The Optimist The optimist looks to the future with AI and thinks: yeah, things…
-
Smashing chat… or how to be a Luddite
Last week I was invited to join the Ned Ludd Raoddio Hour for an interview about the new book. You can listen to it above, or via the podcast page here. Ned Ludd is the legendary figure who, having smashed two industrial knitting machines in protest at their replacement of human craft, gave his name…
-
Burning Questions and Political Facades
Against the ravenous tiger of fire, we give the rich a rifle and the poor a feather. In 1971, an engineer at Ford motors called Lou Tubben invited all of his fellow company engineers to a presentation he’d put together about gas-tanks. Driving around with a whole lot of highly flammable liquid is, when you…
-
The Cloud of All-Knowing | Democracy and Demagogues in the Age of Data
“True power is not the strength to force someone into slavery, but to make them happily lock their own manacles, as if chains were adding to their liberty.” Yesterday The Observer published a long and detailed piece that attempted to join (some of) the dots between the ‘big data’ socio-political technology firm Cambridge Analytica, and…
-
From Russia, With Chaos
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been re-reading Peter Pomerantsev’s book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, each page pushing me towards the same, slightly counterintuitive conclusion: if you want to understand Trump’s America, you need to look to Putin’s Russia. I first read the book when a colleague – a history teacher I’d…