Dr Laura James's writings

I always enjoy the Well's annual State of the World discussion. This year's was no exception . It's great that this long-lived community open up this particular thread for everyone to enjoy. Some of the highlights for me in the 2020 SotW follow. The state of tech, and the state of Making, mostly. Bruce Sterling provided an intro, setting out that everywhere has the same malaise, now. Dubai and Estonia are no longer interesting tech innovators; India is changing too.       So in MMXX, we're in a world situation that claims to be post-global and post-Internet and post world-trade, where everybody wants to take back control, be great again, assure sovereign cyberspace, set tariffs, jail immigrant tots, beat up ethnic minorities, nurture billionaires, ignore science, and reduce education to assure that there are fewer brainy chicks -- but in practice, there's no big difference among the players.  They ALL do that.  There's next to no genuine cultura...

As ever, loosely grouped into topics in no particular order. A helpful clarity from the Prepared : I also found myself ruminating on how workshops like Savage's are wondrous, enchanting places - and how fabrication (the act of converting materials into parts and assemblies) looks almost nothing like manufacturing (the act of making a thing, over and over again, in a repeatable and predictable way). I love both of those things, and each of them is visually fascinating, but I try to be cognizant of the spectrum between them. Also via Spencer Wright a nice article describing the reasons why generative design may not be the future of all design .   Diane Coyle's thoughts on recent and upcoming books and reports on growth, stagnation and degrowth. Via Ian Brown, a great FT review of books about what to do about climate change. More for the reading list! Anatol Lieven... begins by arguing the fundamental obstacle to effective climate action is not a lack of technology or...

A highlight this week was Neil Lawrence's lecture on Intellectual debt and the death of the programmer . Neil has generously shared his slides and notes online, so I'll just highlight some of the aspects that struck me. He started by introducing the AI fallacy, that somehow AI is different from other forms of automation and will adapt to us, rather than us adapting to it. In the section on technical debt, the mythical man month, etc, I was amused to note that Neil called out Amazon's fabled "two pizza team" as American cultural imperialism. The problem arising from the separation of concerns and specialisation of teams is that no one is concerned with the whole system. It's not that software is vastly more complex than, say, building a bridge, but it's harder to assess progress. http://inverseprobability.com/talks/notes/intellectual-debt-and-the-death-of-the-programmer.html Lots of people are concerned with the explainability of individual ma...

It's been too long, and so these notes are too long, but my excuse is that I was wrapping up at lowRISC. On feminine power : But the more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power. .... It’s difficult for us to imagine femininity itself — empathy, vulnerability, listening — as strong. When I look at the world our stories have helped us envision and then erect, these are the very qualities that have been vanquished in favor of an overwrought masculinity. ... I don’t believe the feminine is sublime and the masculine is horrifying. I believe both are valuable, essential, powerful. But we have maligned one, venerated the other, and fallen into exaggerated performances of both that cause harm to all. How do we restore balance? Or how do we evolve beyond the limitations that binaries like feminine/masculine present in the first p...