Confidentiality is key in any profession, especially as it related to client-consultant relationships. I’m hard pressed to find confidentiality foregrounded in architectural codes of practice, but it is crucial in law and financial services. The Handbook of the Financial Conduct Authority, for example, states that a financial advisor (a “skilled person”) “may not pass on…More
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
AI and the Cryptographic City
My book Cryptographic City: Decoding the Smart Metropolis (MITPress) came out in May 2023. Here’s a summary taken from the MIT Press website. Cryptography is not new to the city; in fact, it is essential to its functioning. For as long as cities have existed, communications have circulated, often in full sight, but with their…More
I took my AI on a holiday
Here’s what we talked about, unedited and unabridged. It’s very upbeat! Illustrations are from my holiday in Mauritius June 2023. Me: Like many idyllic islands in the tropics, Mauritius has a dark past. ChatGPT: Indeed, like many places around the world, Mauritius has a complex history that includes both positive and negative aspects. While the…More
Welcome to the Apocalypse
Not everyone is averse to the prospect of a global AI-induced apocalypse. Catastrophizing circumstances and events caries a certain appeal to some, in particular those who identify with the status of a powerless underclass. Let social, political and economic systems fall! Let AI take over! I think here of those who identify as dispossessed, who…More
Generalised AI as existential threat
Many specialised AI applications are acceptably proficient in identifying people, animals and other objects in pictures, in searching databases, winning at chess and in many other areas invisible to most users, such as controlling factory production lines, navigating aerial vehicles, surveillance, medical imaging, diagnosis, and aspects of smart city infrastructures. That’s “narrow” AI. But general artificial…More
Attention scores
One of the important techniques in the new wave of highly successful generative natural language (NLP) models is the use of attention scores in neural network (NN) training. Here I continue the investigation I started in previous posts into how NLP works. To recap: a word in NLP models is represented as a point in…More
AI Armagedon
Should AI research be shut down? A group called the Future of Life Institute warns against the recent developments in generative AI platforms, prompted especially by advances in natural language processing, e.g. chatGPT. The open letter follows their similar warning of 2015. Both letters have several high-profile signatories who are involved in AI development. The…More
Words in order
Neural network researchers invented several methods that store and make inferences about the order of words in a sentence. The main method I will present here provides one of the components that undergirds the recent impressive performance of natural language processing (NLP) models known as transformer models. The method also resonates with my prior investigations…More
AI eschatophobia
It seems that everyone is talking about (or with) ChatGPT. The platform’s convincing conversational acuity and ability to synthesise disparate conceptual threads provides a vivid demonstration of AI’s potential. I’ve now read several accounts online where scholars, programmers, writers, musicians and artists use ChatGPT or similar as a creative companion to explore ideas — comparable…More
Fine tune your AI
My first blog posting appeared 25 August 2010 titled “Tuning as …” It followed the publication of my book The Tuning of Place. In the short posting I proposed: “Tuning might well be the metaphor of our age. ” I was thinking of smartphones and their role in moderating our relationships with environments. The term “tuning,”…More