Dr Laura James's writings

A lot of notes this week fortnight month, but stick with them. There's a comic at the end.  Tech miscellany to start with.  We need to communicate better about technology. Ronald Dworkin breaks down issues with how we describe AI : To keep people in the small world from behaving more ridiculously, or from experiencing more loneliness than they already do, and to head off a potential conflict of religious proportions, we must tell AI’s inventors to set the right tone. No more confusing the passive with the active. Such careful language was unnecessary in the past. People could get away with being lazy and sloppy, and saying that an ocean wave “causes” events. No longer. With the rise of AI, we must be more precise. We must declare AI a bunch of silicon and metal, with no more power to “cause” than an ocean wave. This piece about AI and radiology , how the technology actually works today and what it needs to be capable of to be useful, is accessible and clear. T hree ...

Maintainers III started with a joint keynote. Taeyoon Choi spoke eloquently about many topics.  Much of his talk discussed technology, which I'll cover in a separate post. Taeyoon quoted a great talk by Nabil Hassein in 2018, on computing, climate and all our relationships - definitely worth looking up.  He proposed that we needed a new frame for much of our work and thinking: distribution not decentralisation care instead of control information instead of data How do you know when something is infrastructure? If there's someone on call at 3am to fix it when it breaks, it's infrastructure. Things that are luxuries gradually become services you can pay for, which become utilities (which you can build systems on top of), and eventually something which is a right. For instance, GPS is becoming a utility; a recent US act makes electricity a right (for Americans, not having power is a political thing, which is why hurricanes taking out power is a big deal). But whethe...