Category: Technology
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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…
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‘God-Like’ – Chapter 1 excerpt
I’m really looking forward to getting this out in a few weeks! It’s been a wild ride to write because, as you’ll know, AI right now is such a shape-shifting, slippery beast. The upshot of that is that this book can only ever be a snapshot… but this is why I’ve been super keen to…
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In Which Mark Zuckerberg Says Facebook is the New Church, and We Are All Its Priests
In a recent speech, Mark Zuckerberg has declared that Facebook is the new Church, and its users should all be like Priests. “Communities give us that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are not alone, that we have something better ahead to work for,” he noted, before adding that…
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‘When We Rise Up, We Must Not Lift Away… Real Hope is Horizontal’
Thrilled to announce that my talk at TEDx Exeter is now online! It was a huge honour to be asked to close the event, which was on the theme of hope. ‘Instead of getting out of our heads, we must work with our hands.’ In Countering Political Turmoil with a New Summer of Love I look…
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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…