Tags: artificial



Tuesday, June 18th, 2019

A song of AIs and fire

The televisual adaption of Game of Thrones wrapped up a few weeks ago, so I hope I can safely share some thoughts with spoilering. That said, if you haven’t seen the final season, and you plan to, please read no further!

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the style of the final series or two. To many people, it felt weirdly …off. Zeynep’s superb article absolutely nails why the storytelling diverged from its previous style:

For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

Let’s leave aside the clumsiness of the execution for now and focus on the outcomes.

The story finishes with Bran as the “winner”, in that he now rules the seve— six kingdoms. I have to admit, I quite like the optics of replacing an iron throne with a wheelchair. Swords into ploughshares, and all that.

By this point, Bran is effectively a non-human character. He’s the Dr. Manhattan of the story. As the three-eyed raven, he has taken on the role of being an emotionless database of historical events. He is Big Data personified. Or, if you squint just right, he’s an Artificial Intelligence.

There’s another AI in the world of Game of Thrones. The commonly accepted reading of the Night King is that he represents climate change: an unstoppable force that’s going to dramatically impact human affairs, but everyone is too busy squabbling in their own politics to pay attention to it. I buy that. But there’s another interpretation. The Night King is rogue AI. He’s a paperclip maximiser.

Clearly, a world ruled by an Artificial Intelligence like that would be a nightmare scenario. But we’re also shown that a world ruled purely by human emotion would be just as bad. That would be the tyrannical reign of the mad queen Daenerys. Both extremes are undesirable.

So why is Bran any better? Well, technically, he isn’t ruling alone. He has a board of (very human) advisors. The emotionless logic of a pure AI is kept in check by a council of people. And the extremes of human nature are kept in check by the impartial AI. To put in another way, humanity is augmented by Artificial Intelligence: Man-computer symbiosis.

Whether it’s the game of chess or the game of thrones, a centaur is your best bet.

Sunday, April 28th, 2019



Saturday, April 27th, 2019

Wednesday, April 24th, 2019

Untold History of AI - IEEE Spectrum

A terrific six-part series of short articles looking at the people behind the history of Artificial Intelligence, from Babbage to Turing to JCR Licklider.

  1. When Charles Babbage Played Chess With the Original Mechanical Turk
  2. Invisible Women Programmed America’s First Electronic Computer
  3. Why Alan Turing Wanted AI Agents to Make Mistakes
  4. The DARPA Dreamer Who Aimed for Cyborg Intelligence
  5. Algorithmic Bias Was Born in the 1980s
  6. How Amazon’s Mechanical Turkers Got Squeezed Inside the Machine

The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What’s lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies.

Friday, March 9th, 2018

How To Become A Centaur




It’s the “+”.

Monday, December 18th, 2017

The Real Danger To Civilization Isn’t AI. It’s Runaway Capitalism.

Spot-on take by Ted Chiang:


Related: if you want to see the paperclip maximiser in action, just look at the humans destroying the planet by mining bitcoin.

Tuesday, November 7th, 2017

The Juvet Agenda

Questions prompted by the Clearleft gathering in Norway to discuss AI.

Sunday, October 29th, 2017

Five thoughts on design and AI by Richard Pope - IF

I like Richard’s five reminders:


Sunday, May 7th, 2017

A minority report on artificial intelligence







It helps not to think of them as human.

To which the response is:

No, they’re so much more than that.


Precogs are pattern recognition filters, that’s all.












Saturday, August 26th, 2006

Skeptic: The Magazine: Featured Article
