Archive

Towards an Artificial Brain

The goal of MICrONS is three­fold. One is they asked us to go and mea­sure the activ­i­ty in a liv­ing brain while an ani­mal actu­al­ly learns to do some­thing, and watch how that activ­i­ty changes. Two, to take that brain out and map exhaus­tive­ly the wiring dia­gram” of every neu­ron con­nect­ing to every oth­er neu­ron in that ani­mal’s brain in the par­tic­u­lar region. And then third, to use those two pieces of infor­ma­tion to build bet­ter machine learn­ing. So let it nev­er be said that IARPA is unambitious.

How to Survive the 21st Century

Of all the dif­fer­ent issues we face, three prob­lems pose exis­ten­tial chal­lenges to our species. These three exis­ten­tial chal­lenges are nuclear war, eco­log­i­cal col­lapse, and tech­no­log­i­cal dis­rup­tion. We should focus on them.

Bots I Have Met

Meeting these dif­fer­ent bots has just rein­forced one thing: the images that you’re cap­tur­ing, the online col­lec­tions you’re shar­ing, just pro­vide a foun­da­tion for all dif­fer­ent ways of engag­ing your audi­ence. The more acces­si­ble your con­tent is, the more open the licens­es you use, the more chance you’ve got of hav­ing your con­tent used in new and dif­fer­ent ways. 

Data & Society Databite #119: Mary L. Gray on Ghost Work

I’m just going to say it, I would like to com­plete­ly blow up employ­ment clas­si­fi­ca­tion as we know it. I do not think that defin­ing full-time work as the place where you get ben­e­fits, and part-time work as the place where you have to fight to get a full-time job, is an appro­pri­ate way of address­ing this labor market.

Problematic Predictions: A Complex Question for Complex Systems

When you make a deci­sion to opt for an auto­mat­ed process, to some extent you’re already by doing so com­pro­mis­ing trans­paren­cy. Or you could say it the oth­er way around. It’s pos­si­ble to argue that if you opt for extreme­ly strict trans­paren­cy reg­u­la­tion, you’re mak­ing a com­pro­mise in terms of automation.

Postcapitalism

Neoliberalism is bro­ken. The eco­nom­ic mod­el of the last thir­ty years. It worked for a bit, dragged the bot­tom two thirds of the world’s pop­u­la­tion up the income scale dra­mat­i­cal­ly, facil­i­tat­ed the tech rev­o­lu­tion. But it’s stopped working.

Automation and Algorithms in the Digital Age

I want to think more broad­ly about the future of cyber state, and think about accu­mu­la­tions of pow­er both cen­tral­ized and dis­trib­uted that might require trans­paren­cy in bound­aries we would­n’t be used to.

AI Policy, Is It Possible? Is It Necessary?

When we talk about tech­nolo­gies such as AI, and pol­i­cy, one of the main prob­lems is that tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment is fast, and pol­i­cy and democ­ra­cy is a very very slow process. And that could be poten­tial­ly a very big prob­lem if we think that AI could be poten­tial­ly dangerous.

Nobody Knows a Damn Thing

I’ve always been real­ly inter­est­ed in this idea of whether or not we can pre­dict hits. You speak to any­one who works in the enter­tain­ment indus­try, and every­one has their was sto­ries of that film they were sure was going to become a hit which some­how became a miss. There are niche films which appeal to every­one, and per­haps more like­ly, films that are designed to appeal to every­one which some­how appeal to no one.