The regular schedule has fallen apart. Can I keep opening with excuses?
I’ve been starting to use Are.na more proactively over the last few weeks. Took me a while to get my head around but I really like it as a sort of ‘what if Pinterest but good’ sort of thing. Please follow me if you’re on it. I’ll do the same. It’s mostly pictures I put on there, keeping text to Zotero.
There’s still writing deadlines left, right and centre at the moment and I’m trying to clear the deck before Christmas. I had a review and update of the website recently and I’ve fallen into the trap of agreeing to do writing and then just being asked to do more writing all the time. Some of it is really great though and super interesting so there’s some reward. Look, I’m going that thing where I’m being elusive but eluding to things coming up. Give me a YouTube channel.
Had a nice time yesterday doing a webinar with Arup as part of their infectious diseases foresight project with the WHO. I did a workshop on the project a few weeks before which was really interesting as well. The video from it is up and out there right here so you can catch up with me rattling on about AI and solutionism to some enormously well qualified and experienced experts in public health there.
I updated the website more generally with recent projects as well. Still some things I need to document and edit to get on there but I’ll get round to it eventually.
I literally just finished reading this amazing paper from Vladan Joler and Matteo Pasquinelli The Nooscope Manifested. They position AI as as the ‘nooscope’ – a tool for knowledge extraction and break down the critical issues into 11 categories. It’s a brilliant sumamtion of some of the technical and social dimensions of AI with a million tasty quotes and a super neat summary for technical and social players alike. Another thing I’ve read which really shoots your own attempts at doing the same in the face and throws them out the train.
They dispel a lot of assumption (including my own). For instance, they point out that non-comprehension of new technology is not unique to AI – that there’s nothing about the conceptual construciton of machine learning that makes it different from otehr advanced technologies at their time. Eg, they suggest that early in the invention of the steam engine there was a mystery about how it functioned even after being tested. There’s no reference for this, which is annoying so if you know of one, let me know cos that seems like a super interesting rabbit hole to dive down. There’s so many tasty bits in there ‘the undetection of the new’ will stick with me.
…machine learning learns nothing in the proper sense of the word, as a human does; machine learning simply maps a statistical distribution of numerical values and draws a mathematical function that hopefully approximates human comprehension.
Short Stuff
- As you know I have two real loves in life: computer graphics and the power of bureaucracy. Never before have I seen them perform together but in a rendering engine built inside of Excel. Fuller video explanation here. (via David Benque)
- The New York Times R&D folks have made ‘An End-to-End Guide to Photogrammetry with Mobile Devices‘ which should help my stalled efforts. (via Andrew Sempere)
- Interesting writeup of a project looking at AI and colour with some great references.
- Perfect Sleep from Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne connects sleep, with capitalism, with the climate crisis and ‘allows users to adjust their sleep schedule, slowly increasing their sleep time over the course of three years until they achieve a state of ‘total sleep’.’
- The nuances of prompt engineering for GPT3.
- Against Longtermism. A long piece for Aeon describing a constellation of institutes and ideas that I had little idea were sort of part of one bigger project. It seems obvious that undervaluing life in the present for an imagined imperial future sucks but hey, maybe someone needed to write it down.
- Why the Boston Dynamics video isn’t CGI.
- Superflux have a new film; The Intersection which you’ve already seen unless you’ve been living under a rock. But they have produced and educational guide for it that you might have missed from your rock.
Ok, see you next week (hopefully). Love you.