Robots and Me

thanks to StockSnap for the image I’m restarting this blog as a conversation with the future.   Robots and Me was always speculative – possible robots as well as possible me – but turbulence in my personal life and a lack of ground-breaking developments in AI or robotics made for distraction and neglect: a number of posts got stuck in draft; a greater number never made it that far.   I thought about writing more, but none of those thoughts ever seemed urgent, important or even interesting.   All my energies were focused on getting through the present, a present I thought might be challenging but was at least predictably stable. As it was, up until a couple of weeks ago. Now I feel like I’m spending my days spooling unsatisfactorily between the vaporisation of a world I never questioned, and an unprecedented, unmapped and uneasy future.   I’m looking for ways to deal with – by which I mean work with and work through – social isolation, economic shutd...

thanks to Prawny of Pixabay Dominic Cummings, as usual, has channelled the spirit of the age in his recent recruitment pitch for Number 10 .  Master of precision phrasing, he needed fewer characters than a Tweet to rouse my inner Derek Jameson and smack down hard on one of the hottest HR buttons: “People in SW1 talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity’. They are usually babbling about ‘gender identity diversity blah blah’. What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more  genuine cognitive diversity .” I’ll defend the manifold values of an English degree (seriously) in a future blog, but as I sit here blinking with 2020 vision, it’s time to challenge Cummings, McKinsey, the Harvard Business Review and the management blogosphere on the supremacy of cognitive, as opposed to other, diversity.  So, what exactly is diversity, cognitive or otherwise? Diversity – h...

Nobody is likely to confuse me with Elon Musk, but we share something apart from the burden of an unusual first name and a penchant for pink-trimmed trackie tops: we might be the only two techies on the planet who aren’t thrilled by the thought of Artificial General – i.e. human-level or better – Intelligence. But I think Mr Musk is missing a trick: the real threat to humanity isn’t clever tech’s potential to become a tool of evil dictators. It’s something far more likely, far more insidious. Want to know more? Watch Mr Musk making his case for existential terror while rocking the aforementioned athleisurewear. Check out my budget fashion alternative , and read on to find out why I’m even more panicked than someone who runs three high-risk companies , can’t get a good night’s sleep , and has incurred the social media-fuelled wrath of Azealea Banks . What Mr Musk is scared of Mr Musk – for those of you too impatient to sit through the video or too distracted by hi...

Let me tell you a story: A boy and his father are in a car crash.   The father is killed outright, the son needs emergency brain surgery.   At the hospital, the senior brain surgeon takes one look and yells at the nearest nurse: “Fetch my second-in-command – I can’t operate on my own son!” How is this possible? In several decades of telling this riddle, I’ve been amazed by the creativity of the solutions proposed: adoption, mistaken identity, baby-boys-swapped-at-the-hospital, Witness Protection Program, resurrection, gay dads, prosopagnosia, you name it. Only about one in ten people have come up with what should be the glaringly obvious answer: the brain surgeon is the boy’s mother. Why don’t most people get it? Despite the fact that most English words are on the surface gender-neutral (we don’t say “brain-surgery-man”), English speakers tend to make strong gender assumptions about nouns. We unconsciously expect important jobs, like brain surgeons, C...

Ellie, she's here to listen Today is officially Blue Monday, though nobody needs a pseudo-scientific formula to identify the past few weeks as the most stressful time of the year. Many of us are still smarting from protracted holiday arguments over politics, religion, blighted childhoods or the correct constituents of the festive feast. Others kept shtum, but have returned to work fuming at loved ones’ failure to exercise similar self-control. Everyone feels overfed, cold, out of shape and oppressed by the need for New Year reformation. ‘Tis the season for festering resentments to surface, and new betrayals to erupt: January is peak time for divorce lawyers as well as gym signups , and every authority from the highly-reputable Mayo Clinic to the highly-sensational New York Post recognises year-turn stress as a real, and distressing, phenomenon. Can robots help? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting you spend next Christmas locked away in a dark room with no...