Roblog

32 posts about technology

• 15 February 2026

  Filed under: ai technology law

  AI won’t automatically make legal services cheaper

  In a lengthy article that is my new gold standard for analysing the actual consequences of introducing AI into an industry, Justin Curl, Sayash Kapoor, and Arvind Narayanan explore the effects of AI on legal work.

  Sayash and Arvind had previously authored AI as Normal Technology (also well worth reading), which argues that it’s a mistake by both boosters and doomsters to treat AI as some special category of thing that will lead to humanlike or superhuman intelligence; instead, we should treat it, and should remain in control of it, like any other technology. In particular, we should measure its impact by how it diffuses through society and industry, not by what it’s capable of in isolation, and we should expect that diffusion to take decades, not months.

  This article is their attempt to apply the “AI as normal technology” thinking to a particular industry.

  As a document- and language-focused industry, law has seemed ripe for LLM-based disruption; as an industry that often commands extremely high fees for its work, many people are desperate for that disruption to happen, and for legal work to become cheaper. That motivated reasoning is perhaps one of the reasons why law regularly tops the panic-inducing lists of “jobs that won’t exist in the future because of AI”.

  The authors’ conclusions are much more nuanced. They look at regulatory concerns, which might inhibit AI’s progress into the industry; they look the fundamental dynamics of the industry, in this case the adversarial nature of common-law countries; they look at the impact of past technologies, which often failed to deliver the commodification of law that many people imagined.

  AI, they conclude, won’t fix any of the structural problems faced by the legal industry and those who interact with it as clients, and may even magnify them; but it may be that the mere threat of AI disruption can be an external impetus to reform, reform that otherwise might have faltered through lack of will and coordination.

  I think both the specific conclusions about law and the general framework outlined by the authors are enormously helpful contributions to the discourse around AI, and I’ll be trying to think along similar lines in my own work. #

• 15 February 2026

  Filed under: ai technology journalism

  How the New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere”

  The New York Times has developed a tool to download, transcribe, and summarise various right-wing podcasts, part of what they call the “manosphere”, in order to spot signs of division and discontent within Donald Trump’s base:

  “When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript. Every 24 hours the tool collates those summaries and generates a meta-summary with shared talking points and other notable daily trends. The final report is automatically emailed to journalists each morning at 8 a.m. ET. Currently, the tool is used by nearly 40 reporters across the newsroom.”

  It’s a fascinating use of LLMs in the newsroom. Whether this ends up making bias worse, as the apparent consensus of grifters and racists becomes a signal that influences the Times’ own reporting, is a complicated but vital question. But this specific use-case is just one of many. The tool grew out of another, called Cheatsheet, which sounds essentially like a no-code tool that allows journalists to execute LLM-based workflows against custom data, and which has already led to significant investigative breakthroughs:

  “The Initiatives Team started trialing other applications of LLMs to process large, messy datasets and file dumps on a case-by-case basis. Today, many of those live in a single spreadsheet-based tool. Reporters can drop datasets into Cheatsheet and then run different preset scripts and prompts. Each capability in the menu is known as a ‘recipe.’ Some of those recipes, like transcribing thousands of hours of video footage and summarizing transcriptions, are foundational to the Manosphere Report.

  “Still in its beta, Cheatsheet has already been tested on about 300 users in the newsroom, with 50 of those being ‘really active users’, according to Seward. Right now, at least one new project is created in Cheatsheet every day. The tool has been used to investigate an election-interference group, to transcribe and translate Syrian prison records, and to find recent instances of Trump talking about Jan. 6. At times, Cheatsheet has even been used to take on more thorough historical analysis of podcasts.”

  #

• 

  10 December 2025

  Filed under: technology

  Jevons only knows

  Jevons paradox gets thrown around a lot in the context of AI, but it’s a useful lens through which to view an industry or a role. Should you run towards or away from what you’re currently doing?

• 10 November 2025

  Filed under: technology

  AI-powered nimbyism

  As Frederik Pohl said, “a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

  Lots of optimism about AI in its early days focused on how it might make the job of people in bureaucratic roles much easier, as it massively increased their information-processing bandwidth. But here is the flipside:

  “A new service called Objector is offering ‘policy-backed objections in minutes’ to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.

  “It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to ‘influence councillors’.”

  This is the tricky future we must navigate. One particularly unsavoury detail:

  “Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.”

  #

• 5 October 2025

  Filed under: technology

  Four theories of Meta

  Jeremiah Johnson with a dystopian piece on the seeming contradiction between Meta’s unstoppable financial success and its obviously corrosive social impact, with a depressing conclusion:

  “The only thing scarier to me than a mega-billionaire shoving pornified-AI bots down society’s throat is the idea that even if Zuck wasn’t doing that, we’d be clamoring for someone to step up and do it in his place. And that theory of Meta is what I ultimately think is the correct one. Why did Meta shift from promoting human connection to promoting porny AI chatbots? Because they have access to better data than anyone in the world about what people actually want, and that’s what the data tells them. The terrifying truth might be that even if Meta closed up shop tomorrow, their vision of an AI future would come to pass regardless. Maybe the people just want what they want, and they’re going to end up getting it good and hard.”

  #

• 

  28 August 2025

  Filed under: technology

  My stance on AI

  Staking out a position in an evolving world; trying to figure out whether ethical AI usage is possible; charting a course between the doomsters and the boosters.
• 

  20 March 2025

  Filed under: technology

  Commons over, baby

  AI is the latest technology to threaten our digital commons, and culture more broadly. Can we stop it destroying what we hold dear? Or is the juice worth the squeeze?

• 11 March 2025

  Filed under: technology

  Flipping the switch on far-UVC

  A fascinating post from Richard Williamson about far-UVC, a technique that uses ultraviolet light to kill pathogens in the air without harming people or other organisms:

  “One of the best shots we have at turning the page on airborne disease is an emerging type of germicidal UV (GUV) light called far-UVC. Over the last decade, researchers have documented its ability to eliminate pathogens while being safe for humans. A landmark study from 2022 found that far-UVC reduced the concentrations of airborne bacteria by 98.4 percent in a room-sized chamber, all while operating within safe UV exposure limits. Compared to standard ventilation, this was the equivalent of changing the air completely over in the room 184 times every hour. To put that in perspective, the CDC recommends 5 or more air changes per hour in the workplace. Even hospital operating rooms in the US only require 20. Far-UVC is effective against viruses too; airborne coronaviruses are more susceptible to far-UVC than the same bacteria used in the other study.”

  If it’s so simple, why hasn’t it been adopted yet? Richard argues that the problem is partly regulatory: there is no straightforward approval pathway for a device like this, like there would be if it were a drug. That means that people can just implement it (good) but also that there’s no rigorous trial process that proves its efficacy (bad). Without that proof, large institutions are unlikely to invest in a rollout of something that might be hokum.

  Why doesn’t someone pay for a rigorous trial, then? The other problem is that UVC isn’t patentable (it’s already generic, there’s lots of prior art), so if a manufacturer made the huge investment in proving UVC’s efficacy then its competitors would be able to free-ride off the back of its work.

  This is one of those posts where I have a slight amount of epistemic learned helplessness; I don’t know enough about the science to know if the bold claims of efficacy are true, or if there are unforeseen consequences or side-effects lurking here. But there’s something interesting in Richard’s proposed solution, which is to set up a non-profit to validate the claims so that everyone can benefit. I wonder what other inventions and breakthroughs have this same shape of coordination problem preventing their widepsread adoption? #

• 

  8 January 2025

  Filed under: technology

  Machinery hurtful to commonality

  A new generation of Luddites stand against the big streaming platforms and AI companies. What happens next?

• 22 September 2024

  Filed under: technology

  The collapse of self-worth in the digital age

  Publishing, like virtually every other industry, has attuned itself to the ocean of data that now exists, using it to measure the worth of art and artists in real-time. From Thea Lim:

  “Only twenty years ago, there was no public, complete data on book sales. Until the introduction of BookScan in the late ’90s, you just had to take an agent’s word for it. ‘The track record of an author was a contestable variable that was known to some, surmised by others, and always subject to exaggeration in the interests of inflating value,’ says John B. Thompson in Merchants of Culture, his ethnography of contemporary publishing.

  “This is hard to imagine, now that we are inundated with cold, beautiful stats, some publicized by trade publications or broadcast by authors themselves on all socials. How many publishers bid? How big is the print run? How many stops on the tour? How many reviews on Goodreads? How many mentions on Bookstagram, BookTok? How many bloggers on the blog tour? How exponential is the growth in follower count? Preorders? How many printings? How many languages in translation? How many views on the unboxing? How many mentions on most-anticipated lists?”

  Lim’s heartfelt piece explains powerfully what that culture of measurement does to an artist – and what it’s doing to all of us.

  “We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth.”

  #

• 

  20 February 2024

  Filed under: technology

  Taking stock of AI progress

  We’ve lived with generative AI for a couple of years now. Has it fulfilled its promise or fallen short of our hopes?

• 28 April 2023

  Filed under: technology

  What the UK should – and should not – do about semiconductors

  Richard Jones, whose Soft Machines blog is a great read on industrial strategy, sets out what the UK should do to build an effective semiconductor strategy – of huge importance given the emergence of compute-hungry AIs. The options aren’t amazing, mainly because we’ve been neglectful in the past:

  “The UK’s limited options in this strategically important technology should make us reflect on the decisions – implicit and explicit – that led the UK to be in such a weak position.

  “Korea & Taiwan – with less ideological aversion to industrial strategy than UK – rode the wave of the world’s fastest developing technology while the UK sat on the sidelines. Their economic performance has surpassed the UK.”

  #

• 19 February 2023

  Filed under: technology

  Can We Trust Search Engines with Generative AI?

  The buzz this week has been about Microsoft’s launch of its AI interface to the Bing search engine. Simon Willison, among others, has documented the frankly insane responses that people have managed to coax out of it; it’s clear that, from a safety perspective, this AI really isn’t ready for prime time.

  But how does it fare on accuracy? Nick Diakopoulos of Northwestern University fact-checked some of Bing’s answers – and the results aren’t pretty:

  “But, when it comes to accuracy it’s a different story. I found factual inaccuracies in 7 of the 15 responses (47%). There were also several responses that provided references for a sentence which did not include evidence of the claim in that sentence. Sometimes the claims were accurate, and other times not accurate, but either way there’s a sort of unwarranted credibility conveyed, where the citations to news outlets give a trust signal, but don’t actually support the claim made.”

  #

• 19 February 2023

  Filed under: technology

  Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing

  James Vincent on why we keep failing to understand the sentience of generative AIs – why, in effect, we keep failing the “mirror test”:

  “The mirror is the latest breed of AI chatbots, of which Microsoft’s Bing is the most prominent example. The reflection is humanity’s wealth of language and writing, which has been strained into these models and is now reflected back to us. We’re convinced these tools might be the superintelligent machines from our stories because, in part, they’re trained on those same tales. Knowing this, we should be able to recognize ourselves in our new machine mirrors, but instead, it seems like more than a few people are convinced they’ve spotted another form of life.”

  #

• 20 December 2022

  Filed under: technology

  The Twisted Life of Clippy

  The origin story of Microsoft’s Clippy, the animated mascot we all loved to hate in the ’90s:

  “These days, an annoying Word creature might seem eminently tolerable compared to the ghouls on Twitter. Now that Alexa’s in our bedroom and Siri’s in our hand, Clippy’s a throwback to what seems like a more benign digital age.”

  #

• 

  9 October 2022

  Filed under: technology

  Commodity AI

  With the release of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney this year, AI feels on the cusp of real capability. But who will wield that capability? Will it be controlled by a small cabal of companies with deep pockets and oceans of data? Or will it be something more accessible?

• 25 September 2022

  Filed under: technology

  The last guy in the floppy disk business

  Another great example of niche businesses made possible by the internet:

  “In the beginning, I figured we would do floppy disks, but never CDs. Eventually, we got into CDs and I said we’d never do DVDs. A couple of years went by and I started duplicating DVDs. Now I’m also duplicating USB drives. You can see from this conversation that I’m not exactly a person with great vision. I just follow what our customers want us to do. When people ask me: ‘Why are you into floppy disks today?’ the answer is: ‘Because I forgot to get out of the business.’ Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I’d already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I’d just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn’t try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.”

  #

• 20 February 2022

  Filed under: technology

  Google Slides is Actually Hilarious

  As someone who spends roughly half their day raging at Google Slides, this was truly traumatic:

  “Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions made ages ago that worshipped at the shrine of PowerPoint and which have never since been revisited, but now, after having had to use it so much in the past year, I believe that Google Slides is actually just trolling me.

  …

  “Join me on this cathartic journey which aspires to be none of the following: constructive, systematic, exhaustive. I’m too tired for that, dear reader. Consider this a gag reel. A platter of amuse-bouches. A chocolate sampler box of nightmares.”

  #

• 9 January 2022

  Filed under: technology

  Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought

  In the 1980s, Howard Rheingold wrote Tools for Thought, tracing the history of the development of modern computing from Charles Babbage through to Alan Kay. In doing so, he offered a vision of what computers might be in the future that turned out to be remarkably prescient:

  “The forms that cultural innovations took in the past can help us try to forecast the future – but the forms of the past can only give us a glimpse, not a detailed picture, of what will be. The developments that seem the most important to contemporaries, like blimps and telegraphs, become humorous anachronisms to their grandchildren. As soon as something looks like a good model for predicting the way life is going to be from now on, the unexpected happens. The lesson, if anything, is that we should get used to expecting the unexpected.

  “We seem to be experiencing one of those rare pivotal times between epochs, before a new social order emerges, when a great many experiments briefly flourish. If the experiences of past generations are to furnish any guidance, the best attitude to adopt might have less to do with picking the most likely successors to today’s institutions than with encouraging an atmosphere of experimentation.

  “Hints to the shape of the emerging order can be gleaned from the uses people are beginning to think up for computers and networks. But it is a bit like watching the old films of flying machines of the early twentieth century, the kind that get a lot of laughs whenever they are shown to modern audiences because some of the spiral-winged or twelve-winged jobs look so ridiculous from the perspective of the jet age. Yet everyone can see how very close the spiral-winged contraption had come close to the principle of the helicopter.

  “The dispersal of powerful computer technology to large segments of the world’s population, and the phasing-in of the comprehensive information-processing global nervous system that seems to be abuilding, are already propelling us toward a social transformation that we know very little about, except that it will be far different from previous transformations because the tool that will trigger the change is so different from previous tools.”

  The full text is available online; it’s a great read, not just as a history of an industry but as a historical artefact in its own right. #

• 2 January 2022

  Filed under: technology

  The ‘Long Nose’ Theory of Tech Innovation

  Clive Thompson has an excellent theory of the emergence of new technologies, which he credits to Bill Buxton.

  Rather than coming from nowhere, new technologies are apparent in the world long before they reach widespread public consciousness:

  “…very few major technologies emerge suddenly. Quite the opposite: They’re usually the product of gradual tinkering and experimentation, with engineers and designers puttering around for years or even decades. Things get slowly refined, and the new tech starts being used in real-world circumstances, but mostly in niche areas.

  “Eventually some mass-market inventor notices these niche uses and realizes huh, this tech really works now. They build it into a mainstream product – which bursts into truly mass adoption.”

  Knowledge of this can enable you to search out technologies that might well reach mass adoption in the future:

  “If you wanted to predict the Next Big Thing, the Long Nose theory suggests that you don’t need to look in top-secret corporate innovation labs or in the latest scientific literature.

  “No, you look in the world around you. As Buxton told me, you go “prospecting and mining” – and see what tools are already being eagerly used in areas that lie just outside the mainstream. Those are the technologies that are being stress-tested to the point where they’re ripe to become a mass phenomenon. And you look for something that has that element of ‘surprising obviousness.’”

  #

• 18 December 2021

  Filed under: technology

  AR is where the real metaverse is going to happen

  John Hanke, who founded the company that developed mobile gaming sensation Pokémon Go, advocates persuasively for a conception of the “metaverse” that involves making our current reality better, rather than escaping it into a fictional world:

  “But now people are babbling and swooning about this thing called a metaverse. Companies like Facebook – well, mainly Facebook – are pitching a more immersive vision where people don hardware rigs that block out their senses and replace the input with digital artifacts, essentially discarding reality for alternate worlds created by the lords of Silicon Valley. ‘Our overarching goal… is to help bring the metaverse to life,’ Mark Zuckerberg told his workforce in June.

  “Hanke hates this idea. He’s read all the science fiction books and seen all the films that first imagined the metaverse – all great fun, and all wrong. He believes that his vision, unlike virtual reality, will make the real world better without encouraging people to totally check out of it. This past summer, he felt compelled to explain why in a self-described manifesto whose title says it all: “The Metaverse Is a Dystopian Nightmare. Let’s Build a Better Reality.” (Facebook’s response: Change its name to Meta so it could focus on constructing Hanke’s nightmare.)”

  #

• 28 November 2021

  Filed under: technology

  Processing: the Software that Shaped Creative Coding

  A fascinating oral history of Processing, a programming language designed for artists:

  “Cooper and Maeda established a long lineage of designers and artists who were interested in pushing the boundaries of what code could create. Among them were Ben Fry and Casey Reas, two research assistants in Maeda’s group. During their time at MIT, Fry and Reas began to question how programming was taught to visually minded students. They wondered: How could they make programming more accessible to designers and artists? And what would it look like for code to become both a creative medium and part of the creative process itself?”

  #

• 26 September 2021

  Filed under: technology

  Kids who grew up with Google don’t know how to save files

  The latest generation of university students grew up with ubiquitous search on their computers and devices like iPads and iPhones that don’t reveal the filesystem. Educators are discovering that this means that they generally don’t know where they’ve put their files:

  “Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved – they didn’t understand the question.

  “Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.”

  #

• 19 September 2021

  Filed under: technology

  Mailchimp sells, stiffs employees

  It turns out that Mailchimp’s founders, who recently became billionaires after the sale of the business to Intuit for $12 billion, had spent the lifetime of the company promising not to sell and using that as a reason not to give employees any equity whatsoever:

  “When employees were recruited to work at Mailchimp there was a common refrain from hiring managers: No, you are not going to get equity, but you will get to be part of a scrappy company that fights for the little guy and we will never be acquired or go public.

  “The founders told anyone who would listen they would own Mailchimp until they died and bragged about turning down multiple offers.”

  #

• 1 August 2021

  Filed under: technology

  Jeff Bezos Is Not My Astronaut

  Scott Galloway unleashes an appropriately vituperative take on Jeff Bezos’s bulbous, compensating-for-something “cocket”:

  “Astronauts, my ass. Apollo 11 and Columbus travelled 240,000 and 3,000 miles to reach the moon and Caribbean, respectively. New Shepard 4 traveled 0.026% of the way to the moon. Put another way, on Tuesday we watched a man plant a flag three feet up from base camp at Mt. Everest and expect to be knighted. This weekend, I’ll be in Montauk. I plan to swim a half-mile from shore (I can do this) and declare I’ve discovered Spain.

  “It’s his money, and he has the right to spend it on what he wants. But if Mr. Bezos was genuine about doing something more than crashing a canary yellow T-top Corvette into a Bosley for Men franchise, he could raise the minimum wage at his firm to $20/hour.”

  (H/T: Max Bray) #

• 1 August 2021

  Filed under: technology

  The Untold Technological Revolution Sweeping Through Rural China

  In this review of Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm, Clive Thompson explores the bewildering, empowering, and alienating forces of technology that are shaping rural China as the country grapples with a deeply cloven urban-rural divide, massive and continuing urbanisation, and the question of how to feed an ever-growing population. The future is here, and not everyone benefits:

  “Wang also finds that, for rural China, tech-propelled business models can produce the grim dynamics of the gig economy, where a far-off tech giant runs your life. The blockchain chicken software? It’s nifty, but the farmer neither understands the technology nor owns it; it’s provided by a tech firm that in the first year of their collaboration ordered 6,000 chickens in advance to sell off to an online supermarket, and in the second year, nothing. Meanwhile, those Taobao villages also contain some embittered merchants who hate the e-commerce platform, because it allows buyers to demand refunds long after they’ve received their goods. One shoemaker has lost so much money this way that he’s forced to make lower- and lower-quality shoes to keep his profits up. ‘It’s all a scam,’ he says.”

  #

• 27 May 2021

  Filed under: technology

  A TikTok Star’s Fave Accessibility Apps

  Lucy Edwards is a hit on TikTok with her videos explaining her life as a blind person, breezily answering questions from viewers that they might feel awkward asking otherwise. Lots of her videos focus on technology (How does she film herself? How does she read a menu in a restaurant? How does she edit her videos?), and Apple have done a special feature on the apps she uses.

  I’ve seen videos of visually impaired people using iPhone accessibility features before and always found them incredible. This is another great example of a side of technology that most people never see, but that is vitally important as more and more of modern life involves being able to use technology. #

• 4 May 2021

  Filed under: technology

  YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K. Historians want them to stop

  Like many people, I’ve been captivated by the recent glut of upscaled and enhanced historical films, like the 1911 footage of New York City or the incredible stabilised film taken from Wuppertal’s Schwebebahn in 1902.

  Such footage is incredible, but uncanny; I thought it was simply the glitches and artefacts of the upscaling process, but there’s actually an ethical unease here too, as Thomas Nicholson explores.

  “Digital upscalers and the millions who’ve watched their work on YouTube say they’re making the past relatable for viewers in 2020, but for some historians of art and image-making, modernising century-old archives brings a host of problems. Even adding colour to black and white photographs is hotly contested.”

  Nicholson quotes the film historian Luke McKernan, who says:

  “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference. It makes the past record all the more distant for rejecting what is honest about it.”

  #

• 15 April 2021

  Filed under: technology

  The Healing Power of JavaScript

  Craig Mod writes beautifully on the healing power of programming computers, a sanctuary of knowable certainty in a world aflame:

  “This work of line-by-line problem solving gets me out of bed some days. Do you know this feeling? The not-wanting-to-emerge-from-the-covers feeling? Every single morning of the last year may have been the most collectively experienced covers-craving in human history, where so many things in the world were off by a degree here or a degree there. But under those covers I begin to think – A ha! I know how to solve server problem x, or quirk y. I know how to fix that search code. And I’m able to emerge and become human, or part human, and enter into that line-by-line world, where there is very little judgement, just you and the mechanics of the systems, systems that become increasingly beautiful the more time you spend with them. For me, this stewardship is therapy.”

  It’s a long time since my time has been mostly occupied by programming, but I still feel the same draw Mod does. Tinkering with this site, writing a little script, withdrawing temporarily from the messiness of the wider world and focusing for a moment on a tiny, knowable part of it – and in doing so achieving something, creating something, and generally pushing some kind of mental reset button. #

• 19 February 2021

  Filed under: technology

  Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

  The transcription of a talk by Maciej Cegłowski that I’ve dug out and re-read over and over again since he gave it in 2016. He addresses the question of whether an artificial intelligence will be developed that far surpasses our own intelligence and, if it will, whether that will mean the destruction of humanity. It’s a question that has absorbed and terrified some notable names in the world of technology:

  “The computer that takes over the world is a staple scifi trope. But enough people take this scenario seriously that we have to take them seriously. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and a whole raft of Silicon Valley investors and billionaires find this argument persuasive.”

  Cegłowski then proceeds to set fire to the arguments in favour of superintelligence in a straightforward and provocative way. (I particularly like “the argument from Slavic pessimism”.) #

• 4 February 2021

  Filed under: technology

  The Relentless Jeff Bezos

  Ben Thompson’s weekly Stratechery article this week is a doozy: it’s a profile of Jeff Bezos, the soon-to-sort-of-retire CEO of Amazon, and what makes him perhaps the most effective and impactful startup founder in history.

  Bezos is one of those interesting characters that’s perhaps simultaneously over- and under-rated. Fawned over by business bros for his (important!) drive and determination, people spend less time focusing on just how visionary he was at several key junctures, and perhaps underestimate the impact of those visions on the global economy. He spotted the unique potential of the internet from a retail perspective, creating a store that could only exist on the internet; he spotted the unique potential of creating computing primitives that could be used internally by Amazon but also be built into the behemoth that is Amazon Web Services; and he spotted the unique potential of becoming a platform rather than merely a retailer. #

• 29 January 2020

  Filed under: technology

  Artificial Morality

  Bruce Sterling on AI ethics:

  In the hermetic world of AI ethics, it’s a given that self-driven cars will kill fewer people than we humans do. Why believe that? There’s no evidence for it. It’s merely a cranky aspiration. Life is cheap on traffic-choked American roads — that social bargain is already a hundred years old. If self-driven vehicles doubled the road-fatality rate, and yet cut shipping costs by 90 percent, of course those cars would be deployed.

  …

  Technological proliferation is not a list of principles. It is a deep, multivalent historical process with many radically different stakeholders over many different time-scales. People who invent technology never get to set the rules for what is done with it.

  #