Kester Brewin

Category: Technology

  • Talk in Reading – Monday 15th October

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    I’ll be in Reading tomorrow evening (Monday 14th) speaking about the book and helping lead a discussion about the issues around AI and our relationship to machines, and one another. Info here about the event! And you can hear my segment on BBC Radio Berkshire this morning here: I’ll have some copies of the book…

  • Honey, you look thirsty

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    Interesting piece in The Conversation this week about relationships with AI chat-bots… and the market models that they are using that invariably tap into human desires. The idea of an AI partner was well explored in the film HER. But what’s missing from that is any dimension of value-extraction. This is not how things are…

  • ‘No god in the machine’

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    Really good edition of The Guardian’s ‘long read’ released as an audio piece last week: ‘No god in the machine,’ written by Navneet Alang and read by Narinder Samra, based on an article published in August. It’s a very well crafted overview of the AI space, and the ‘tech solutionism’ that I’ve been talking about…

  • ‘Good’ Grief?

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    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…

  • ‘Artificialising’ Intelligence – or the ancient art of cheating

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    Last week a journalist got in touch to ask me what I thought about the use of calculators in A-Level mathematics – the two-year ‘gold standard’ exam in England and Wales that many students choose as they build to go to university. The question was put like this: To what extent did you find students…

  • SnapChat is taking your face, and Facebook is taking your chat.

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    Two things caught my eye this week around how big social media companies are looking to harvest content to train AI models. As a sidebar, it’s useful to remember that social media companies really, really don’t give a crap about community, friendship, being social or whatever else you want to say about friendship and relationships.…