Automation isn’t evil. As a precipitator of performance and efficiency, it’s the stuff of dreams. Pursuing automation blindly, however, leads us towards a cliff edge, with nothing other than manmade systems to prevent our fall. ..
Read More
Being human once meant living in close communities, hunting, socialising, breeding. It meant existing in tandem with the earth and nature, a close and intimate relationship that’s foreign to our modern mindset. Now, we view the natural world with scepticism. We build fences around it and place warning signs; we crop and trim its contours until it falls within our definition of safe...
Read More
Those who found the concept of an automatic gear box disturbing have had scarce time to adjust; we’re already onto the next marvel in automation, and this time we’re barely involved. We’re substituting the role of master for that of watcher, even servant. With automatic cars, human presence takes a diminutive role – providing little more than context (i.e. the reason why a car drives from A to B)...
Read More
Deep learning technology is progressing at an astronomical rate. The idea that Alexa can go beyond machine learning to consider meaning and context as well as verbs and nouns in recognised patterns, is both exciting and terrifying...
Read MoreWe’re never going to be content. Technology has seen to that. There’s always going to be something new to make a mockery of the old. Since we started pumping our air with the innovative spirit, business as usual hasn’t been business as usual. We’ve been shaking up the dusty establishment, discarding the detritus and devising new ways to work and play...
Read MoreIn Western society, efficiency commonly trumps questions of right and wrong. We are far less concerned with whether an action is just, when it is profitable. Scores of jobs are made redundant each year in low-skilled industries, where the labour can be better done by a computer, be it a ticket machine or robotic arm...
Read More