Tech Essays

A Timeline of Communication Patterns (part 1)

by

Smiling, touching, watching, copying, talking, listening, singing, dancing, painting, writing, and making – these are the ways we have always connected with one another. From cave paintings to the latest AI models, our methods of communication have been shaped by the culture in which we are born, power hierarchies, and the technologies of our time. But how did early societies manage to encode meaning that could be understood? How did we transition from simple gestures and sounds to complex forms of expression? Early Systems …

Read more

Metaphorical Thinking – The Cloud Metaphors

by

Metaphorical Thinking – Introduction Metaphorical Thinking – the Guest Metaphor Metaphorical Thinking – the Cloud Metaphors Metaphorical Thinking – the Web Metaphors The ethereal, shape-shifting quality of clouds makes them a perfect instrument for concepts that apply to metaphors, meditation, behavioural science, or computer science. I am on cloud nine. Every dark cloud has a silver lining.  I have my head in the clouds.   Cloud Computing In the remarkable Dictionary of Symbols by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, clouds are defined as “instruments of apotheosis and epiphany” and “clouds were connected with the symbolism of …

Read more

The Dangers of AI Fast Fashion Content

by

The shock brought by the release of ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art chatbot from the AI research laboratory OpenAI, will redefine how we relate to writing. ChatGPT is an extensive language model trained on a dataset of billions of words and can generate human-like text. It was all good and fun to ask ChatGPT to rewrite Bohemian Rhapsody as the life of a postdoc, how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James version of the Bible, generate essays or Harvard applications in seconds. But the AI …

Read more

How to Counteract Disinformation

by

The last few years exposed more than ever the fragility of our information ecosystem. Elections, Brexit, social unrest, COVID-19 conspiracies, and the war in Ukraine have been used as disinformation operations by certain actors to undermine faith in governments, raise fear and anger, confuse and manipulate us.  Disinformation is information meant to deceive (trolls posting fake news). In contrast, misinformation is false information with no malicious intent (our friends and family genuinely believe in disinformative content and willingly share it).  Why is Disinformation Effective?  …

Read more

How Elden Ring Tests the Player’s Learning Ability

by

Note: I wrote this article in collaboration with my husband.  Hidetaka Miyazaki grew up in an impoverished family in Shizuoka, Japan. Although he didn’t fully understand English, he borrowed many English fantasy and science fiction books from his local library. The boy let his imagination fly and fill the language barrier gaps by creating stories from the books’ illustrations, a skill that would prove helpful in a few decades. Later, he would say about his childhood: Unlike most kids in Japan, I didn’t have a dream… I …

Read more

How Ideas Cross-Pollinate to Advance Diverse Disciplines

by

I always advise my people to read outside your field, every day something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections. Nobel prize winner Oliver Smithies in dialogue with writer David Epstein in Epstein’s book Range  One of the things that surprised me as a parent was how much I benefited from …

Read more

What Holds Back Innovation

by

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. Sherlock Holmes  For at least five millennia, we used wheels for transportation, from carts to cars, trains, pushchairs, bicycles, etc. Across ages, we also had heavy trunks to carry luggage. To help with the workload of carrying bags, we used carts with wheels to transport them because wheeling bags was much easier than lugging them. But still, for all the creative minds and visionaries that humankind had across centuries, it …

Read more

AI’s Impact on the Future of Jobs

by

May you live in interesting times.   An English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse The First Industrial Revolution brought us the steam engine, while the Second Industrial Revolution focused on steel production, chemicals, electricity. The Third Industrial Revolution, called the Digital Revolution, was characterized by the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web. How will the Fourth Industrial Revolution look? Profoundly exciting and highly problematic. New vistas will open where incredible breakthroughs can happen because AI holds enormous potential. This …

Read more