That Space Cadet Glow

Opinions, thoughts and ideas from the CEO’s eclectic monthly newsletter
The Emperor’s New Metaverse
I've tried really hard not to write about the 'metaverse' (inverted commas deliberate), but the more I hear about it the more despondent and dispirited I get. So, if you'll indulge me, I'd [...]
Trust me, I’m an AI
AI is meant to do a better job than humans, otherwise what would be the point of having it? Well, a different approach, taken by researchers at Cornell University, is to try and get [...]
AI’s Awkward Teenager Phase
Yann LeCun, AI guru and co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, reckons that the current state of AI is "characterised by trial and error, confusion, overconfidence and a lack of overall understanding". So, [...]
Scraping the Botto of the barrel
On the 2nd December I be presented a keynote talk to artists and art market professionals on behalf of DACS. We looked at the role of AI in art, particularly where AI-generated art [...]
Foam, sweet foam
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a smart foam material that allows robots to sense nearby objects, and to repair themselves when damaged. The self-repairing ability comes from creating a spongy material that fuses [...]
Death of an Algorithm
It is not often that you hear of AI algorithms failing in the market, but that is essentially what happened in the case of real estate company Zillow and its house-buying estimator algorithm, [...]
‘Please put down your cigarette. You have 20 seconds to comply’
In Singapore, the government have been trialling robotsto patrol housing estates and shopping centres in order to detect 'undesirable social behaviour'. It's not quite Robocop, but it's certainly moving in that direction. The [...]
Fill your face
A key mantra of Responsible AI is 'just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to'. So when some schools in Ayrshire, Scotland, start using Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) on school children [...]
When working from home is your only option
Most articles about robots show a shiny machine with a smiley face trying very hard to provide some trivial service to a human. Most examples end up just being marketing hype and novelties [...]
AI’s Fatal Flaw?
I've written a few times in the past about how the latest raft of massive algorithms, such as OpenAI's GPT-3, can generate offensive text because they have been trained on pretty much the [...]