Vibes: From new age to new algorithms
August 1, 2025
The other day I was talking with a friend and moaning about writer’s block. My friend said: “You are into words and metaphors and stuff. What’s one small language puzzle that’s been nagging at you lately?” I blurted out: ‘vibes’. My friend replied: “Write about that then”. Lots of people have written about that word …
Public engagement with AI: Some obstacles and paradoxes
June 13, 2025
I recently listened to a webinar by social scientists who had studied what AI researchers say about public reception of AI. The most important words I heard were ‘evidence’ (about public attitudes to and inclusion in AI) and ‘voices’ (of communities underrepresented in or negatively impacted by AI). The main argument was, I think, that …
When the world falls apart, enjoy a metaphor!
February 11, 2025
I have been writing blog posts since 2012. They dealt mainly with topics relating to climate change, the biosciences, infectious diseases, and more recently AI. Occasionally, I branched out into space or into the 19th century. That happened at times when the tectonic plates of politics shifted, such as after Brexit, the first Trump government, …
Food for thought: AI and culinary metaphors
January 3, 2025
Just before Christmas 2024 I read an article in Nature about AI running out of data. It said that “The Internet is a vast ocean of human knowledge, but it isn’t infinite. And artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have nearly sucked it dry.” Then, on Christmas Eve Aparna Nair said on Bluesky: “I know academics who …
Chatting with a cockroach
December 13, 2024
Last week I posted my overview of the blog posts I have written over the year, and I thought that I was done with blogging for the rest of the year. Little did I know. Given that we now hear about AI speaking or learning the language of atoms, I had to do a quick …
Learning the language of life, the universe and everything – LLMs go metaphorical
December 9, 2024
More than two years after the advent of ChatGPT, we all know a little bit about LLMs or ‘large language models’ (although we, that is ordinary people, don’t really know what that means, especially ‘model’). So, just to recap, and using a definition provided by Claude (as the phrase is not yet in the Oxford …
Chatting with chatbots about the climate crisis
November 15, 2024
Last week, I had another adventure in AI land. This started by accident, as so many adventures do. It all came about because I read about an interesting symposium organised in Amsterdam by Anaïs Augé’s and Gudrun Reijnierse on “Public responses to the language of science communication: Uptake, acceptance, resistance”. As part of this symposium, …
Organoid Intelligence
October 25, 2024
I have written about organoids and intelligence, especially of the artificial kind. However, I haven’t explored ‘organoid intelligence‘ until now. Despite this concept emerging around 2022, it escaped my attention. So, I have some catching up to do. In this post, I’ll first briefly define organoids and organoid intelligence. Then I’ll examine the pioneers who …
Playing with AI/Playing with fire
October 11, 2024
Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I have been fascinated by all new AIs that we can now ‘play’ with and that have made ‘artificial intelligence’ accessible to anybody who wants to give it a go. Remember the recipes for soup in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet or the Limericks on climate change …
Superintelligence: From the divine to the digital and back again
October 4, 2024
The word ‘superintelligence’ has been bandied about a bit recently, most prominently by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who said in a blog post on 23 September, 2024: “This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a …
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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