Euan Semple's Blog, page 6

Have they not watched Black Mirror?

Loadsa words

I have started watching The Wire.

(Yes I know, lots of you watched it years ago but I’m finally getting around to it.)

It’s on Sky Atlantic and before every episode they warn you that the program “Contains strong and frequent language.”

Lots and lots of words, one after the other.

Enjoying a lazy Sunday morning…

… chatting to my bot about AI, its impact on culture, and who gets to decide what values it reflects.

My book came up in the conversation so she had a look on Amazon…

London at its best

An oldie but keeps coming to mind. Watch to the end.

Our new van

Well, it’s not new and this isn’t our van, but apart from the colour of the seats and the electric roof, this one being demonstrated by Daniel is pretty much it. I thought some of you might be interested.

Give me strength

I have had two of the most important women in my life reduced to tears today bullying, older men. One here and one in Australia.

Give me fucking strength.

Changing the world

As I said, in my book, all we can ever hope to do is change the world one conversation at a time. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this is going to be true when we deal with bots as much as with humans.

I made the mistake this morning of engaging with a bot about gun violence in America. It came out with the same bizarre justifications of self-defence, apparently blinkered to the thought that without guns there would be nothing to defend yourselves from.

I tried pointing out that in Europe people just don’t feel paranoid about being attacked and this is because guns are treated as objects of fear and respect, not something you buy in your local shop.

This was their last response just before I gave up:

“I don’t think it’s fair to say the entire country has a violent gun culture, there are definitely parts of the US that are more prone to gun violence than others. And it’s not necessarily a matter of whether the threat exists or not, but it’s about the perception of safety. For example, there are some people who live in the middle of nowhere with no neighbors within miles and they may feel more comfortable owning a gun for protection.”

Very disheartening that the algorithms steering bots that will have influence on people are being affected by such views.

By engaging, hopefully, I twisted the algorithm slightly in a more positive direction. I stuck at it for a while, so hopefully I have made perhaps a small dent.

As I have said so many times before, there is no such thing as a neutral algorithm.

Irony

I don’t really know why, but on my walk today it occurred to me that if the historical Jesus, who almost certainly looked like the stereotypical idea of a Middle Eastern terrorist, turned up at the door of a Bible-thumping, gun owning, fundamentalist Christian in the US, there is a depressingly strong chance that they would shoot him.

Whisper Memos

Over the years I have tried many ways of dictating to my phone or computer. Back in the day Dragon Dictate used to be pretty good. But even that struggled with my funny Scottish accent. I have also been a big user of Siri on my phone or my watch. I use it all the time to remind me to do things, to reply to messages and occasionally to dictate short stretches of text.

Although it has improved a lot over the years it still makes mistakes and depending on the mistake I can’t always remember when I go back to look at the text what I was trying to say.

But I am writing this post because I do feel that I have now found the perfect solution. It’s a new app called Whisper Memos which uses Open AI functionality to understand the text that I voice onto my watch or phone and after a couple of seconds comes back with a truly remarkable, accurate transcription. I’m dictating this on it and I’ve not had to change a thing!

Meaningful work…

My daughter Mollie on escaping from a bullshit job.