Dr Laura James's writings

Last week was the launch of the  Trust & Technology Initiative  at the University of Cambridge. I talked briefly about the ways technology forms part of wider systems, and some of my hopes for the initiative. Here’s my (rough, rather last minute) talk. We build the technology we can imagine — such as what we see in our science fiction. One of my very earliest projects at AT&T Labs was prototyping a Star Trek communicator style badge. My boss was a big Trekkie. You hit the badge, it recorded 30 seconds of video, so you could capture an introduction with someone, and get a reminder later of who they were, their face, what they said about themselves. I wish I had one today — there’s a lot of you and I’m bad at remembering names and faces. (If you’re wondering about the data privacy issues there, this was nearly 20 years ago, we thought very differently then. We never imagined these clips would go outside one’s personal, secure systems.) You may also wonder

I’ve decided to step back from active involvement in the  Collective , and to focus on my other projects for a while. In the meantime, the engaged members of the Collective are discussing issues which I brought to the table. I’m sure this seems unreasonable to some, and so I wanted to set out my reflections on how we got here, in a possibly futile attempt at explanation, and learning. This post is probably only of interest to committed Collective members, and those who have been watching our progress. It is a tale in which I fail to spot that an organisation I co-founded was not what I thought it was for 18 months. And in which despite my repeated attempts to encourage it to pursue the mission I thought we set it up to for, it seems no one else noticed that we had fundamentally different and essentially incompatible ideas within the active membership. facepalm What happened? We set out in  Digital Life  with great ambition,  it seemed to me , to provide (or at least tr