Celebrating magic and murder
November is the month of Guy Fawkes night and remembrance day, both of which made me a little uncomfortable this year. I was acutely aware that there was a huge amount of pain and suffering behind both...
View ArticleWho gets the enhancements?
I’ve been interested in transhumanism since I began to understand the decisions about human enhancement that will face future generations. If you’re wondering what human enhancement means – the...
View ArticleTruth is what you believe, so believe what is true
Who decides what is true? It’s difficult to know who to trust and traditionally we looked to the educators, the politicians and the clergy, but they’ve become crowd pleasers rather than crowd leaders....
View ArticleWhat’s the point of prohibition?
As ever, I’m coming at this from a lay-person’s point of view. I have nothing more than an average understanding of the law, so please read on in that spirit. To prohibit is defined in the dictionary...
View ArticleStuff changes, doesn’t it…
What we consider acceptable today was different five years ago, very different twenty years ago and unrecognisable a hundred years ago. How does it happen? Look at the way our attitudes are changing to...
View ArticleWatch the bankers riot…
Imagine a world where the government is about to regulate wages so that top incomes are no more than ten times the lowest. Imagine you’re earning a really high salary, as a banker let’s say. Imagine...
View ArticleBlinded for a day?
If the technology existed to swap your perfectly good eyes with malfunctioning ones and then swap them back again a day later, would you? It’s not as ridiculous an idea as it might sound; technology is...
View Articleif corporations governed us…
Have you ever been in a supermarket queue with someone shouting in your general direction that there are plenty of empty self-service tills? I have. I was in one when I started to ponder what it might...
View Articledetect deceit and delete
I came across these two stories last week – there’s an algorithm that can detect deceit in your social media feed and Twitter has been telling people they don’t exist. This led me to ponder what it...
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Machine Learning Algorithms
Are machines that learn for themselves the stuff of nightmares or a vision of a wonderful utopian future? The answer, of course, is neither. We all know that technology is neutral, even though we...
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Bias in, bias out
Google Translate has developed an understanding of the meaning behind words so that it can translate directly from one language to another using the concepts behind phrases rather than a word by word...
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Will the machine learning community protest?
Following on from my recent blogs about machine learning, here’s a bit of good news. Well, probably good news. Scientists and researchers at Google and Toyota are trying to do something about bias in...
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Automation: a life of luxury and the death of democracy?
There’s been a fair amount of press coverage lately on the potential for artificial intelligence and robots to take our jobs and how a Universal Basic Income could be part of the solution. Something...
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Are selfish AIs a good thing?
Could it be true that Google Deep Mind has discovered that AIs are more likely to choose a course of action that tests their ability than one that might lead to the outcome they’ve been programmed to...
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Cracks in the Code
Why are we enthralled and appalled by the idea of a robot apocalypse? Getting lost in the fantasy of a film or a book, being petrified by the impending end of the world and knowing at the back of our...
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The discussion…
After Paul Simon reviewed Fluence in the Morning Star we talked about how reviews could be more collaborative. In some ways I think Eating Robots and Other Stories lends itself to discussion more than...
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Quantum algorithms, drugs and photosynthesis
One of the great things about living in central London is being able to pop out on any day of the week to an interesting event. This week I went to a London Quantum Computing meetup (no jokes about...
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The Age of the Ageless
Recently I was thinking about writing a story set in a world where you never die. Now, that’s not an original idea I grant you, but nonetheless it is a fascinating idea that can be used to illuminate a...
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Cautionary Tools
I was struck recently by a piece in Nature: the international journal of science on what science fiction has to offer a world where technology and power structures are rapidly changing. As the headline...
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The future of flirting?
Now here’s a thing. A piece of wearable tech that automates flirting. If it spots someone looking at you via its cameras it diverts its ‘eyes’ towards them and vibrates. As you turn it lets you know...
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