A new week, a new book. This week it's Steven Johnson's Wonderland: How play made the modern world. Johnson's thesis is that much technological innovation attend from the pursuit of happiness and distraction rather than from hard-headed economic need. In one of the early chapters he charts how the work of automata manufacturer Jacques dear … Continue reading The Thinking Duck
Category: Themes
My wife and I argue about thermostats. After this article we'll probably argue about thermostats and my blogging. I see a room or car thermostat as a device to set a target temperature for the space in which it sits. If I'm too cold, I judge whether to increase the temperature a bit. If I'm … Continue reading Hot under the collar
At the end of my street is the reasonably busy road that links the suburbs of Teddington and Kingston. At peak times the traffic can pass slowly, sometimes queuing in one or both directions. Even at non-peak times there is a constant flow of cars in both directions. Taking a right turn North out of … Continue reading All in a glance
In conversation yesterday I realised that I've developed an occasional habit of defining alternatives to the Turing Test as ways of understanding quite how far away Artificial Intelligence really is. Here's the compilation... https://twitter.com/ballantine70/status/542986402800365568 An observation that humans are getting quite good at being able to parse complete gibberish that is the result of "AI" autocorrect … Continue reading New Turing Tests
There's a free ticket available for the Customer Experience World event at which I'm speaking next month. All you need to do is send you answer to the following question: What is the percentage of people using Twitter for Customer Service now? a) 60% b) 70% c) 55% by email to sandie@thefocusgroup.org.uk T&Cs here: http://www.focusgroupevents.com/CEW-Digital-2017/competition
Computers are very good at following rules. It's kind of what they do. If you look at the recent landmark advances in machine intelligence, they are generally in one of two camps: using artificial intelligence to excel in a rules-boundaried domain (playing Chess, Go, Jeopardy, Poker, the markets and so on), or alternatively to use masses … Continue reading Following rules
Let me paint you a picture. In sound. The metaphors that we have to describe how the future might be are incredibly biased towards things visual. We talk about "visions", not "hearings". We are, if you listen to the neuro-linguistic geeks, incredibly visual in our preferences for how we receive information. A picture paints a … Continue reading Audiomented reality
The hope here is that HR can empower organisations with robust tech and data to turn the art of people management into a science Perusing an article from HR Magazine yesterday about the impact that technology is having on the HR industry, I started to wonder what it is that people really mean when they say that … Continue reading When I grow up I want to be a science
And so the insurrection is beginning. Last week Japanese insurance Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance announced that it was going to be replacing 34 staff with an artificial intelligence that would be calculating payouts (although, it noted, with human oversight still making final approvals). The technology would improve productivity by 30% and the firm expected to save some … Continue reading The rise of the cost-benefit robots
This week I have learned: I struggle to understand how the "rational" approach to the impending President Trump is anything other than fairly irrational. I am contemplating buying a Mac. Long story. So much of my career has been in roles where the value is a narrative, not a set of KPIs. That can be … Continue reading Weeknote 320: 2017
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