To achieve consensus is a laudable aim of any decision-making body. Dissensus is the opposite: a condition of widespread dissent. Forays into the philosophy of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) support the role of dissensus within communities, including urban communities. I examined the relevance of Lacan to digital media back in 1999 in my book Technoromanticism. I…More
City stories
I am investigating the potential role of conversational AI in the city. Some planning theory asserts an inevitable link between words and urban space. Planning theorist Lieven Ameel summarises this state of professional urban intervention in a 2017 article. The paradigm shift from a top-down kind of planning towards a more dialogic, participatory and discursive…More
AI and communicative action
At their best, developments in cities are informed by consultation with large numbers of residents and stakeholders. In his summary of the state of planning theory in 2005, Phil Allmendinger wrote: “Recent revisions to UK planning process predicated on inclusion and consultation perhaps add an addition to this mix, that of stakeholder values and desires…More
Urban inhibition
A group of students meets casually to relax and chat. One of the lecturers enters the circle. The conversation becomes stilted. Silence descends. The presence of any particular individual can excite conversation — or inhibit it. There are complicated dynamics in play here involving power, familiarity, social norms, and relationships within groups. That one agent…More
Conversation-centric computation
In the previous post I alluded to some of the challenges of encouraging large language models (LLMs, e.g. AI chatbots such as chatGPT) to communicate with one another in ways that are oriented to some task, and that don’t settle on merely exchanging platitudes. In spite of their instant access to parameters trained on vast…More
Societies of AI minds
In the 1980s, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky authored the book The Society of Mind, which outlined how we could think of the human mind as so many communicating agents: “Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in…More
AI agents
The sociologist Bruno Latour (1947-2022) and others who subscribe to actor network theory (ANT) are keen to admit objects and things as well as people into the field of social study. Hammers, kettles, baskets and remote controls [71] are participants, actors and agents in networks of relations. As well as providing settings for human actions,…More
An AI focus group
Before widespread digitalisation, I recall borrowing books from the library that were graffitied with penciled underscores and multi-coloured hi-lighter markings indicating what various past readers thought important. In terms of my previous posts about attention in NLP models, such markups constitute a compelling record of human-based “multi-headed attention.” I described multi-head attention in my previous…More
Multi-head attention
My fascination with electronic sound production began when my father brought home a Grundig TS 340 reel-to-reel stereo tape recorder. Like many other recorders it had separate heads for recording and playback, which meant that you could play a recording, add new sounds and feed the combination back through the recording head in real time.…More
Spatial affinities
In natural language models (NLMs), semantic embedding vectors capture the position of a token in multidimensional feature space. The space is derived from word proximities in a natural language corpus and is derived by the automated adjustments to weights within a neural network model. NLMs can deploy these vectors in a number of ways, including…More