The True Disruptors at COLLISION 2023 Were Asking us to Slow Down and Listen
My slightly grumpy take on Collision for Spacing (and some people I met there that restored my confidence).
Local Contingencies: Modelling Artificial Intelligence in Mid-Century America
Happy to contribute this talk for ‘Big Data and the History and Philosophy of Science” back in May.
It’s Conference Season
I’ll be at these conferences/events this Spring/Summer. Come and say hi!
Toronto Machine Learning Summit, June 13-14, Carlu
Absolutely Interdisciplinary, June 20-22, Munk Centre for Global Affairs & Public Policy
Munk Debate on Artificial Intelligence, June 22, Roy Thompson Hall
Collision 2023, June 26-29, Enercare Centre
The Undebate: Societal Impact of AI, June 28, Glenn Gould Theatre
Association for Computational Linguistics, July 9-14, Westin Harbour Castle
Coming up…
American Anthropological Association, Nov 15-19, Toronto
NeurIPS 2023, Dec 10-16, New Orleans
“Metaphors of the ‘Virtual’ and the ‘Artificial’ in Post-WW2 Computer Science” in Perspectives on Science
The pre-print for a paper I delivered last year as part of the project “Virtual Particles” (A1) of the Research Unit “The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider” at CERN.
Click here for more.
Will AI really ‘change everything’?
I wrote what I thought was a useful corrective to never-ending deluge of AI hype (originally I wrote “bullshit” but they didn’t want to print that in the Globe for some reason). The vast majority of the apps built on top of GPTx and other LLMs have one purpose: to create marketing copy/emails/product reviews/blogs… also known as spam.
Read the full article here.
I also spoke on Edmonton’s CHED with Chelsea Bird about hype and how people can be more critical of the claims of Big Tech regarding AI’s super-human powers.