Over the past two weeks, I’ve been doing a civic duty as a juror at the local Crown Court. Before starting last week, I’d become a bit concerned that I would be spending quite a bit of time looking at how society goes wrong. I studied enough Criminology at university to know that poverty, drug … Continue reading Civic duty
Category: Themes
I am, however I look at it, getting quite old. I'm old enough to remember the 1970s and the Christmas present I received, a CBM Electronic Calculator. I was amazed by how I could enter numbers and symbols, and the machine would return correct calculations. I'm old enough to remember the first experience at home … Continue reading Technonovelty
As we enter into the final stages of the editorial processes for randomthebook.com, yesterday I found myself with a creative challenge. Each of the stories in the book will be illustrated with a pop art-style collage. I've been struggling to get into the task, so wanted to break it down into more manageable steps. In … Continue reading Disposable applications
For many years, I've had a pet theory that you can tell a huge amount about the culture and values of an organisation from what you see and experience in their office reception area. Some examples: A large insurance company I visited in the City of London some years ago had toilets available for visitors … Continue reading Software as signs
Back in my mid-thirties, as you may already know, I spent a couple of years employed in the world of management and leadership development. I spent my days working with managers from across all sorts of organisations and at all sorts of levels helping them to discover better ways in which they could lead and … Continue reading Situational AI
Eight or so years ago, I was doing some work for a UK law firm. At the time, across the legal industry, there was considerable interest in AI, primarily machine learning, to automate high-volume work such as commercial conveyancing for mortgage lenders. Ultimately, the aim was to reduce costs. I remember a conversation with one … Continue reading A benchmark for AI
This week I have learned: what the heck deep research actually is in the LLM tools. It's been useful already. how nice it was to catch up with former colleagues from Microsoft earlier in the week. Microsoft was a pretty torrid period in my career. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. … Continue reading Weeknote 739: deep research
I've observed something over the years that I've started calling "regression to form". It's the depressing inevitability that if you give people something that looks even vaguely like a form, they will treat it as a form. As a result, the objective shifts from thinking to form-filling. From conversation to completion. From understanding to box-ticking.Take … Continue reading Regression to form
In last week’s WB-40, guest Rufus Evison drew an interesting analogy between how LLMs work and Daniel Kahneman’s Fast and Slow thinking model. Rufus described how LLM responses are “fast”, almost instinctive based on past experiences and pattern matching, and the problem with them is that they need to be more “slow”, deliberative and logical. … Continue reading The Messy Truth About “Thinking” Machines
I've been thinking lately about how we're rather good at solving problems, but surprisingly bad at identifying what the problems actually are. Take the double diamond process that every design consultant worth their salt will draw on a whiteboard: diverge to explore numerous solutions, converge to select the best one, diverge again to prototype, and … Continue reading The problem with problems
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