Category: Technology
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In memory: Peter Stedman
For those who have picked up a copy of the new book, you may have seen that it is dedicated to my cousin Peter Stedman, whose funeral I am going to on Monday. The dedication reads: In memory of my cousin Peter,a truly kind and remarkable soul,a very real intelligence who, in 1981,with a Commodore…
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Oppenheimer, John Donne, and the atomic origins of AI
You will probably have seen the news that #Oppenheimer, the film directed by Christopher Nolan, has won a bunch of Oscars. What you might not know is that the story it tells – of the birth of the atomic bomb – has two lesser-known dimensions. The first concerns the name given to the first test…
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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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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…
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AI vs Car Culture – Fasten your Seatbelts?
Just a typical Friday night in San-Fran. A Waymo driverless taxi stops in the street. A guy jumps on the bonnet and smashes the windscreen. A crowd forms, and cover the car in spray paint, break its windows, and set it on fire. I’ve been thinking a lot about cars as I’ve written God-like my…
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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…