So if it’s important to have a position on AI consciousness (yesterday) - because it matters if consciousness is present but also if consciousness isn’t possible at all - then how could we tell?
Susan Schneider and Edwin Turner (also mentioned yesterday) put forward the need...
Susan Schneider, philosopher and director of the Center for the Future of Mind, AI & Society, recently highlighted the risk of ethical confusion: "prematurely assuming a chatbot is conscious could lead to all sorts of problems."
The problem is that chatbots are great mim...
Historian Dr Francis Young on extraterrestrial life and its imagined implications (Bluesky):
One of the most darkly funny scientistic pieties is the idea that the discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth would ‘humble’ humanity - given that in the late c19th and early c20...
When I was a kid when you went to a proper chippie - fish and chips traditionally on a Friday - you could ask for “batter bits” (regional naming statistics) which were the wonderful leftover deep-fried scraps of fish batter, and you’d get them free.
Anyway apparently if the ...
People are really leaning into doing work video calls in otherwise-quiet cafes hey.
At this point cafes have given in.
Even without calls, sitting next to someone who is at their laptop and in the zone is a whole thing. Like standing at a train platform when the non-stopper ...
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An AI bot for mayor? (NBC, 2024):
A Wyoming resident says if he’s elected mayor of Cheyenne, he’d leave all the decisions to a customized ChatGPT bot.
Victor Miller got 327 votes. Shame.
I mean… better to do this transparently vs politicians badly prompting AI chat and ...
I have two talks and a podcast to tell you about.
Designing with AI 2025, Rosenfeld Media
10-11 June, online.
Two days on the responsible and innovative uses of gen-AI, for
… UX designers, researchers, writers, and other conscientious product people who are excited by the p...
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The flag of Nicaragua has a blue stripe at the top and a blue stripe at the bottom.
In the middle, on a white background, a triangle in which there is a rainbow over five volcanoes.
In the middle of the rainbow, at the centre of a radiating star of blue rays: a hat.
This ...
I subscribe to ChatGPT and I subscribe to Claude and I chat with both AIs a ton – but why can’t I invite a friend into the chatroom with me?
Or multiple chatbots even! One that’s a great coder and another that’s more creative, with identity so I know automatically who is goo...
I grew up with the idea that you could put a paper note in a bottle and throw it into the ocean, and somebody might find it a thousand miles away.
We talked about that a lot. (Also: grandfather clocks; suits of armour; quicksand; spontaneous human combustion.)
Yes bottles st...
I assumed that birds use the geomagnetic field to fly halfway around the world. They don’t. Not all of them.
Homing pigeons, it turns out, use smell. At least for a few hundred miles. Although, at shorter distances:
within a familiar area, pigeons navigate by relying on lan...
I keep notes for TV show concepts. Because well I don’t know why because, but that’s not my point here. My point is that they often include really mundane robots?
FOR INSTANCE:
A show like The O.C. (or maybe Normal People for a heavier take, if you want) but it’s the kids of...
Let’s take a meme’s eye view of MAGA fashion.
The hypothesis of the green beard (Wikipedia) is that there’s a way for some individual genes to signal their presence, which allows for selective social cooperation favouring that particular replicator – and the targets of this ...
The gentle sound of the surf fills the soul.
No frequency left untouched. But never colouring outside the lines; never too loud.
It occupies the senses and allows detachment without dissociation. It lifts the mind just a fraction, a gliding ballroom aquaplane through thought...
So I ran a marathon at the weekend.
I was going to say “my first marathon” - which it was, my first I mean - but that makes it sound like there are going to be many, which uh I don’t intend so much. Let’s see.
I expected a marathon to be hard. It was harder than I expected i...
I was interviewed for the 84th edition of People and Blogs, "the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs."
So if you want to read about the backstory to this blog, or my creative process, or the technology (and my philosophy around it),...
My formative experiences of computing and the internet are now regarded as “history” haha
Which is BRILLIANT because I get to experience them all again, only via people who are doing the work to actually document and interpret it.
So, some links!
Cybercultural is by Richard...
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Humanoid robots.
I feel like something that isn’t super well appreciated in civilian world is quite how quickly humanoid robots will arrive, and quite how good they will be.
See, there are a bunch of humanoid robotics companies now. Here are five robots:
Atlas by Boston...
Diane, it’s Thursday and I’ve been figuring out how transcription fits into my everyday work. I had to make up a character to make it make sense, as I’ll say.
So I’m doing a little teaching this week and next. A two week mini module at AHO (Oslo) on designing interfaces for ...
Because I’ve been wool-gathering about homeostasis I picked up a Useless Machine (Wikipedia) from Amazon.
It’s a box with a toggle switch on the top. You flip the switch to ON.. a hatch opens, and a little hand emerges. It flips the switch OFF again.
You’ll have seen one, I’...
Two of my old app ideas have recently become buildable! Which is neat.
They’re very different… but, it turns out, connected by the principal of homeostasis – the ability to be self-stabilising.
And that, in turn, gives me a new perspective on self-driving companies.
Old idea...
In the spirit of: if you don’t ask, you don’t get…
There are some people I’d like to meet! They are ”speculatively things I do professionally in the world”-related though not immediately work related.
So here’s my wish list.
Books! I have a couple ideas for nonfiction books....
The phase space of coffee is large enough that many people can wait for their orders without collision, and that means the barista doesn’t need to take names, and you don’t need to memorise your place in line.
By which I mean: the gap between ordering and collecting is, say,...
File this one under: prototypes I would make if I had the time.
So the product concept starts with something I said the other week, in my write-up about MCP (Anthropic’s new plug-in protocol for chatbots). A big chunk of my AI use is chatting about things like
the Hanoveria...
I started blogging here precisely 25 years ago on 19 February 2000. I was 22 when I started and I am now 47.
My silver jubilee!
I felt when I started in February 2000 that I was coming to blogging late. I procrastinated about setting it up. People I knew were already doing ...
There’s that asteroid 2024 YR4 which currently has a 2% chance of hitting Earth in 2032.
Uh oh.
I kinda feel like… reading the socials… people are weirdly gleeful about the prospect?
It’s true, it is somehow comforting to contemplate the potential of the end of the world tha...
I’ve been trying out a new technique to plug in knowledge and capabilities to AI apps like chat, using an emerging open standard from Anthropic called Model Context Protocol (MCP). It’s early days but it has momentum.
So I would say that right now is the time for organisatio...
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The Heider and Simmel animation (1944) (YouTube).
It’s a big triangle, a little triangle and circle moving around a box – and part an early demonstration that people infer complex social intentions and story even though the geometric shapes look nothing like humans.
All t...
Part of getting older is finding that my PBs each time I train up - personal bests - are not as quick as they were before.
I record my runs on Strava but really I don’t need to check, I remember my old pace.
As an on-and-off-again runner who is motivated each time round by g...
You know those big illustrated boards with holes in? You poke your face through and you have the body of a cartoon wizard or something, and someone takes a photo. You get them at the seaside and tourist destinations.
They don’t appear to have an official name.
Though Wikiped...
