The human side of AI: Delivery robots in Milton Keynes
November 17, 2023
This post has been written in collaboration with Alan Miguel Valdez, Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management, The Open University, Milton Keynes *** At the beginning of November 2023, an international AI Safety Summit took place at Bletchley Park, the iconic location of World War II code breaking feats. What has perhaps not been stressed …
Science and trust – the sequel
November 10, 2023
In 2018 a new ‘International Science Council’ (ICS) was established and I wrote a blog post in which I critically dissected the announcement of this launch. I tried to show that this announcement seemed to perpetuate a series of misconceptions relating to science and trust. At the end of October 2023, the ISC Centre for …
Super-intelligence and Supercomputers: When frontiers collide
November 3, 2023
This post has been written in collaboration with Alan Miguel Valdez, Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management, The Open University, Milton Keynes (the home of Bletchley Park and of little roaming robots) *** This week the UK AI Safety Summit took place at Bletchley Park, an iconic location associated with the Turing test and, therefore, …
ChatGPT and its magical metaphors
October 27, 2023
Last week, a new issue of Technoscienza, an Italian journal of Science and Technology Studies, landed in my inbox. It had a very intriguing cover, co-created between Sergio Minniti and ChatGPT — a portrait drawn by ChatGPT using ASCII. But that was the least of it. After Sergio had prompted ChatGPT to create this stunning …
Frontier AI: Tracing the origin of a concept
October 20, 2023
The UK government has convened an international AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire which will take place on 1 and 2 November, 2023. On 16 October the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology tweeted: “The agenda for the opening day of the #AISafetySummit has been published. The UK is laying out a focused plan …
What are metaphors (for)?
October 13, 2023
I have been thinking about metaphor for a long time. But I have never brought my core thoughts together in one place. Here we go… and of, of course, they are not just my thoughts…they are inspired by a myriad of thinkers from the 19th century onwards, including, of course, George Lakoff and all those …
The language of life meets large language models
October 6, 2023
Between about 2014 and 2018 I was involved in the social and communications side of ‘synthetic biology’ as part of the Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SBRC) here at the University of Nottingham, which uses engineering biology approaches to understand and then modify industrially-relevant bacteria. I wrote my last blog post on synthetic biology in 2020. …
Evelyn Fox Keller (1936-2023)
September 25, 2023
On 22 September 2023 Evelyn Fox Keller sadly passed away at the age of 87. She had been a theoretical physicist, a mathematical biologist, a feminist philosopher, a historian of science, and an inspiration to many across these fields. She integrated insights from all these fields creatively and critically, and, most importantly, she added some …
From Omicron to Omega: What’s in a name?
September 22, 2023
The last few years have been years of planetary upheaval. We have all lived through a Covid-19 pandemic and are, in fact, still living with it, and we have all felt the effects of climate change. To deal with these planetary events, we had to invent and learn new concepts and new names. Quite recently, …
Crumbling buildings: Metaphors we live in
September 8, 2023
Metaphors are ways to make something abstract concrete…. You know where this is going….. Metaphors make us see something as something else, for example life as a journey or institutions as buildings and failing institutions as crumbling buildings. In September 2023 this latter metaphor spread like wildfire. RAAC (and ruin) Our Department for Education here …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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