MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
The STW hive seems well informed, particularly on matters of tech. I need to learn about artificial intelligence (not the technical side) in terms of its practical applicability and what might happen with the automation or augmentation of traditional white-collar work.
There's bound to be something that is sensible and in the middle of the spectrum of dystopia (we are all doomed) and utopian (tech will save all problems and we'll live like underemployed kings).
What's good to read, please?
I've just started reading https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SC43RXT/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 and I'm enjoying it (though not read that much of it yet)
Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine by Hannah Fry
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1114076/hello-world/9781784163068.html
It was a couple of years ago but I recall it was pretty readable.
Tools and Weapons - Brad Smith (Microsoft President). Obviously from a Microsoft point of view, but deals with the ethics of AI.
https://news.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/tools-and-weapons/
Not a book, but may help as an intro: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/responsible-ai?activetab=pivot1%3aprimaryr6
What's your goal?
I enjoyed this blog post the other day. I don’t dispute its value in certain applications but it seems people seem to fetishise ‘big data’ and AI to find a solution as these are on trend.
Homo Deus, a brief history of tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus +1
Not a book but was lucky enough to see this presentation, which was just ace - fast-forward 12 minutes to dodge the waffle, but Daniel Hulme did some really interesting high-level stuff about AI.
+1 for Hello Word by Hannah Fry. Has some good thoughts on the current limitations of AI and where it works well alongside human input.
'THe AI Does Not Hate You' by Tom Chivers looks good. Haven't read it though.
Both are pop science books rather than technical tomes.
Ticking this to return to - some great recommendations so far.
Check out Lex Friedman he’s an Ai scientist with lots to say on the matter and his podcast is a must listen, even though 90% is way above my ability to understand
What about this episode of Start Trek from 1968.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer
Terminator?
you look like a thing and I love you. This will give you some amusement and an idea of how far AI has to go in terms of language use.
This site might provide some links to a report of interest and further reading. While it produces results estimating the chance of being replaced in the workplace by a robot It makes for some fun in the meantime. Apparently my job has a 1.5% chance of replacement by robots. No Brave New World-like relaxation for me then. Understandable, the ‘AI’ in products like trifacta, spotfire, and some NLP applications helps they’re also not-quite-there in being able to eliminate some tedious tasks.
Forbes is usually a site of fairly weak insight but it has easy to read articles with some relation to the world of work. this article might provide some stepping off points and promotes the author’s recent book on AI.
In all this futurism I always keep the quote about prediction being hard in mind. Thinking of the way that some AI models are trained it seems a fairly good one.
Automation in drug discovery seems to have sped up sample handling and eliminated some associated tasks. Well, when the robots don’t break down. https://aabme.asme.org/posts/robots-for-drug-discovery