Search for "artificial intelligence"
Brains, organoids and cultural narratives
May 4, 2018
For a while now I have been observing developments in neuroscience, stem cell research and tissue engineering, in a rather desultory fashion. Behind my back things began to happen and grow. Organoids In 1989 the journal Science reported on research into ‘organoids’ (or, as the OED defines them, the “growth of cells or tissue in culture …
Frankenstein is about US not STEM
January 19, 2018
I was reading my tweets the other day and came across this one: “I am reading the octopus book. My main hobby now is looking up from the octopus book in order to share octofacts.” This is popular science (communication) at its best.* It also made me think. If readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) had …
Meanings of RRI: The missing link between theory and practice
November 21, 2016
This is a guest post by Alasdair Taylor, Industry Programme Manager at The Royal Society, formerly a research chemist at the University of Nottingham. This blog post is based on the author’s article (co-authored with Sarah Hartley and Warren Pearce), ‘Against the tide of depoliticisation: The politics of research governance’, published open access in Policy & Politics. …
The ghost in the machine: Of automation, algorithms and AI
May 15, 2016
Despite working at the fringes of a field called Science and Technology Studies, I am a bit of a technophobe. I was introduced to computers in the early 1980s and I am still not totally in tune with some of the things they do. To misquote Arthur C. Clarke, most technology, and in particular advanced …
Atoms are not people: comparing the natural and social sciences
May 18, 2012
Following a Twitter debate this week on the utility of social sciences cf. natural sciences as a basis for public policy (see the above screenshot for some of the comments), I thought it might be time for a preliminary sketch of the differences between these two (very) broad areas of knowledge. Is social science a …
Being all at sea
July 12, 2024
It’s summer, but it isn’t. It is intermittently grey and rainy and stormy, with a few days of sunshine in between. In another year without a summer, namely 1816, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or so the myth goes* …. If she could sit in the Villa Diodati in gloomy weather and write, why can’t I, …
Truth, post-truth, and post-fake
February 2, 2024
I was sitting at my desk trying to think about something I could blog about. For some reason the word ‘truth’ popped into my head. After that I engaged in a bit of ‘reading the tea leaves’. That is, I messed about on the news database Nexis, rummaged in the Oxford English Dictionary and looked …
LLaMas, Alpacas and Dolly 2.0: Exploring an emerging AI menagerie
April 21, 2023
There was a time when llamas were llamas and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Now we have LLaMas, Alpacas and AI programmes that impersonate cloned sheep. I’ll first say something about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that launched a hundred fury creatures, then something about another chatbot that …