People often remember better, or differently, when in the company of others. A reading of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) and science writer Israel Rosenfield (1939-) supports the collaborative aspects of remembering, recalling, interpreting and, in terms often used in logic and language studies — generalising. Conversation provides the primary demonstration of this capacity to recall…More
Neural networks that recall
It looks as though LLM technology can enhance web search without conceptually overhauling the web search methodology. (See previous post: AI versus web search.) But is there a way that neural network retrieval methodologies can be used as a substitute for explicit indexing? After all, the human capacity to recall does not rely on indexing.…More
AI versus web search
Discussions of AI in web search are often overtaken by concerns over the risks associated with automated user profiling (see post Surveillance capitalism and its discontents). Setting aside that raft of concerns, it’s worth reviewing claims about how AI facilitates efficient and helpful web search. AI enabled search Gemini (https://gemini.google.com/) is the name of Google’s…More
AI ethical filters
Claude.ai is a conversational platform using a large language model (LLM) developed by the Google-supported AI company Anthropic. It’s a rival to the popular ChatGPT. Claude’s self-claimed selling point is “I’m an AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest.” I tried Claude last year but lost interest when it told me…More
From CAD to AI
The complex relationship between cybernetics and semiotics outlined in previous posts helps me at least identify major differences in thinking about cities, and the lack of comprehension by adherents to one with the other. In part it’s a distinction between a calculative approach to cities, and a more humanistic orientation, and by “humanistic” I mean…More
Cybersemiotics
When it comes to the practical applications of AI, in particular urban AI, scholars look to historical legacies. As I reviewed in the last post, urban researchers such as Federico Cugurullo see the introduction of AI as mainly under the influence of cybernetics. That stems from the work of Norbert Weiner and his book Cybernetics,…More
Urban AI and cybernetics
If you want to investigate how two entities relate to one another then it can be helpful to introduce a third that is somehow relevant to both. Architecture and cookery can be conjoined via the concept of taste — that kind of thing. In my blog posts to date I present language as providing a…More
Semantic geocoding
In the previous post I examined the what3words proprietary geolocation/geocoding tool. With that system the 3 words are pre-assigned randomly from a lexicon of acceptable words. There are good reasons for detaching the 3 words from the content of the grid squares. If the 3 words referred to the content of the squares then map…More
Word-based geocoding
The tomb of Oscar Wilde is at at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The What3Words (W3W) address is ///crawler.falls.gossip. Tombs are good objects to locate via W3W geocoding as they typically fit within a 3×3 meter grid system. The cell immediately to the right of ///crawler.falls.gossip is geocoded as ///bottled.premises.beards. So the code does not…More
What’s wrong with pluralism
I’ve had many conversations with chatGPT on subjects as diverse as writing computer code to comparing and contrasting ideas from philosophy. The performance is impressive. It is a little like talking with an extremely well-informed and patient tutor. It is also unlike that kind of pedagogic human-human interaction in several respects. It becomes obvious to…More