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...

Labour was a theme cutting across sessions at Maintainers III. There was one specific session exploring it, which turned out to be quite data-driven (but also US-specific).  Data about labour is often missing, for various reasons. Half the workers in the US are paid by the hour, so their overall wage is unknown and with unpredictable work schedules statistics struggle to paint a realistic picture. Many people have two or three or more jobs; perhaps 40% have some sort of 'side hustle'.  Some forms of intangible labour, such as that of graduate students in universities, are hard to track (that's on top of the unpaid labour in care, in the home and so on). This is perhaps unsurprising given people are generally happy not to know about the poverty and precarity of others. Quite a few sessions discussed unions and labour organising, including mention of the Tech Worker Coalition as well as more traditional unionisation. In the US, collective bargaining was developed in a w...

It’s been two weeks of intensive thinking about maintenance. First we held the second Festival of Maintenance in Liverpool on the 28th September; then I travelled to Washington DC for Maintainers III last week. You can find a summary of the 2019 Festival (and where it came from) over on the Maker Assembly blog . Many thanks for the support over the last two years, Maker Assembly! 2019 was my first Maintainers event, made possible by a Fellowship from the Software Sustainability Institute . Sitting down to write up MIII is quite an intimidating task, as there was so much material covered and a great richness to the ideas we explored. Both events brought together diverse people and communities around a sense of a shared ideal - that there is great value in maintenance that we are not recognising sufficiently today. It was good to be at an event with clear goals. Andy Russell managed to pull together three themes for his closing summary at MIII - a tough task, with two and a ...

Starting with a perceptive and interesting idea from incredible women: https://twitter.com/CassieRobinson/status/1181139137212174336 Doteveryone released a report on Better care in the age of automation . It's a stonker - lots of really insightful points (and worth reading the detail)  Superflux produced an accompanying video which illustrates one possible care future. It doesn't go where you'd expect the story to end up.  Recommended. ( Find out more about the film. ) There's a short video featuring some of the experts involved in the report - including carers and those receiving care. Dan Hon looks into StreetScore as an example of machine learning, the way papers are published and new projects started. His title says it all: Streetscore, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love machine learning. I am just not sure that it is responsible to create a dataset for 21 cities, based on 3,000 images from two cities, while simultaneously admitting that t...

NationBuilder - a nice example of how legally connecting bits and bobs gets you targeted advertising not for products, but for politics . Fascinating notes from a Harvard workshop about public interest internet - politics, standards and infrastructure. Thanks Niels ten Oever. PwC’s recent Responsible AI Diagnostic Survey of more than 750 senior business executives through September 2019 found that only 34 percent think their use of AI is in line with their organisation’s values . UN entities are not subject to GDPR , it turns out. Cybersecurity for cars is a huge industry - growing to $2.3b in 2025 ! Maybe car companies should have spent money upfront on securing their designs, rather than paying startups to fix problems later. (via Beau Woods ). Cybersecurity for shipping. A fascinating tale of investigating how vulnerable systems are. An investigation into how Boeing's financialisation links to the 737 MAX crashes . An article from early this year by Deb Chachr...