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  • What’s the opposite of flourishing? Languishing

    (there’s a paper in this, I think, exploring what’s at stake in defining languishing as the opposite of flourishing rather than, as Chris Smith, suggests destruction)

  • Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

    From T.S. Eliot’s East Coker: So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres-Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholy new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one…

  • The next wave of GAI: the digital daemon is coming soon

    When my preoccupation with this began last summer I imagined it was still years away. These are digital assistants which augment your capacity for reflexivity through learning about your activity, with a view to optimising your life in your own terms. But the first generation of digital daemons will be coming to the market soon(ish).…

  • “The appearance of characters, including skin color, is randomly generated and not intended to convey any particular message or bias.”

    ChatGPT’s response when I queried the ethnicity of the figures in this scene, the instructions for which involved “a drunk or drugged hedge fund boy” and a “passed out body”.

  • Makers, we, of perfectly contemplated machines

    From Lawrence Joseph’s Visions of Labour: Industrial Revolution is who owns and controls the data. That’s what we’re looking at, labour cheap,replaceable, self-replicating, marginal, contracted out into smaller and smaller units. Them? Hordesof them, of depleted economic, social value, who don’t count, in any situation, in anyone’s eyes,and won’t count, ever, no matter what happens,…

  • Are you a map-maker or a bungee jumper with your writing?

    From Helen Sword’s Air & Light & Time & Space loc 950: Cecile Badenhorst distinguishes between “mapmakers” who plan their route before they begin writing and “bungy jumpers” who dive straight into a project without really knowing where they are going, supported by a blind faith that they’ll eventually rise to the surface again:6 processes…

  • The institutional hole at the heart of Manchester

    This was interesting from Mike Emmerich about the ‘institutional hole’ at the heart of Manchester. He contrasts Manchester to Cambridge where “the number of places in which people who want to get involved in the city can bump into each other, at lectures, at dinners, at conferences, at business summits, at community this and community…

  • A map of AI productivity tools

    Andreessen Horowitz’s market map (via Mem):

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #58

    The pen is stubborn, sputters – hell!Am I condemned to scrawl?Boldly I dip it in the well,My writing flows, and allI try succeeds. Of course, the spatterOf this tormented nightIs quite illegible. No matter:Who reads the stuff I write?– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Prelude: 59

  • A trans reading of Poor Things

    I thought this was a brilliant reading of Poor Things by ZoĂŤ Rose Bryant in contrast to slightly stultifying arguments about whether this is a feminist film, what sort of feminism it is and whether it embodies this effectively: And so, it was also because of this that I knew I’d have a special connection to Poor Things as…

  • Visualising the University of Manchester Campus

    This project explores the University of Manchester campus as a locus of change and site of memory within the wider city. Based at the Manchester Institute for Education, the UK’s first Faculty of Education founded in 1913, it invites public submissions of photography which depict the university campus as a lived context. Residents of the…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #57

  • Tell us where you’re from, what you want to become

    Tell us where you’re from, what you want to becomeAnd we’ll say if you’re OKWhere did you go to school?Right answer and you’re coolYeah, you’re the kid the whole dayYou got a sticker in your face, information about the caseSo you know your potentialDon’t think you can extendDon’t think you can extend, just comprehendBut I…

  • 📍Open resource: Using generative AI during a PhD

    Are you teaching PGRs how to use generative AI? We’ve decided to make this briefing note open, under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license. You’re free to use it as long as you don’t modify it and credit us for it.

  • The cultural capital involved in applying for a PhD

    I’ve been slowly realising how much cultural capital is involved in applying for a PhD. It’s an opaque and hyper-competitive process with little in the way of public guidance available. I suspect it’s getting worse, but I was lucky enough to be supervised by someone already teaching me as a masters student, so the opacity…

  • Inspiration is the indolent indulgence of the dabbler

    This is typically brilliant from Nick Cave on creative responsibility in a dying world. I’ve added emphasis on the section which perfectly captures what I’ve been struggling to find the words for over the last couple of years: What makes our particular job so exceptional that it requires inspiration or a muse to do it?…

  • Digital-first scholarship

    It occurred to me when reading the diaries of former-FT editor Lionel Barber that perhaps my work on digital scholarship is effectively just arguing for the academic equivalent of what he calls here digital-first journalism: In 2013, we will shift to ‘digital first’ journalism. In practice, this means that the newspaper will be derived from…

  • An introduction to asexuality

    I’d forgotten about this great documentary I was in from 2015:

  • I never trusted my love and her wallpaper feelings

    A scrapbook of snapshots taken in shaky concealmentNever trusted my love and her wallpaper feelingsThere’s something so comforting about her uncertain armsThere’s beauty in danger, safety in harm

  • When technological innovation reduces productivity in the workplace

    Great example from my colleague Drew Whitworth’s Information Obesity pg 28, which I suspect we’re going to see replicated in the coming wave of GAI-automation: In the 1940s, a group of researchers at the Tavistock Institute in London were asked to investigate why the introduction of technology into some coal mines had actually led to…

  • The disturbing world of GAI-video

    OpenAI’s Sora demo dropped at just the point I was writing a lecture on GAI and disinformation/misinformation. Tempted to just play this video and ask the students to think of examples of how the technology could be misused.

  • Daily Mail (2000): the internet may just be a passing fad, as millions give up on it

    The experience of the web then social media suggests it will be a couple of decades before we see the full implications of generative AI. Expect just as many bad takes about it being a fad as there were about it immediately changing everything.

  • How often do you interrupt yourself?

    From Attention Span by Gloria Mark loc 1637: In a first study, we logged computer activity of thirty-two people over five days to get a precise measure. We found that our study participants averaged checking their inboxes seventy-four times a day, replicated a year later in another study where we logged the computer activity of…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #56

  • On stopping when you’ve still got something to say

    One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever encountered was Ernest Hemingway’s suggestion that you stop writing when you’ve still got something to say. I’ve found this a reliable way of ensuring you chain together days of productive writing, avoiding the patterns of binge and bust which many academics are prone to. It…

  • 📍Exciting opportunity to join our team: 2 x permanent T&R lectureships at University of Manchester

    Exciting opportunity to join our team at the University of Manchester: 2 x permanent T&R lectureships: 1) Lecturer in Generative AI for Education2) Lecturer in Digital Education  Innovative team, lovely department, world-class university, incredible city. What more could you want? 🤗

  • Capybaras: water loving hippo hamsters who can’t be bothered enough to care

  • Setting your own technological rhythm

    From Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life by Gloria Marks: Paying attention to it can let us know when to recharge so that we’re not trying for nonstop focus and getting overspent. Our resonance with rhythm can help us restore our psychological balance, which we’ll talk about more later. Being in control of…

  • Building local journalism around quality rather than quantity

    This is great from the Mill’s founder and senior editor about online advertising is (particularly) pernicious for local journalism. It incentivises quantity over quality, with the intention of generating as many page impressions as possible. Subscription based models generate more income per viewer, providing a much more effective fit with the smaller and more finite…

  • Adorno and the Busenattentat (breast action)

    Thanks to Milan StĂźrmer for introducing me to this incident: See also Lacan vs the situationist heckler

  • Current mood in AI generated images #55

  • Spam for academics will soon be GAI-generated

    I just received this interesting spin on the usual spam inviting me to pay a fee to promote my journal article. I’m certain these questions about my (open access) paper are GAI generated and suggests that automated spam might soon be entirely GAI-generated: Hi Mark Carrigan; I have a number of questions about your paper…

  • Hey chatbot, are you an object of fantasy for your users?

    I put the same question to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Here’s how they responded. ChatGPT: The relationship between users and conversational AI agents like myself is a fascinating subject, blending aspects of psychology, technology, and social interaction. The points you’ve raised touch upon several complex and intriguing aspects of this relationship.Firstly, the constant availability and…

  • When you get what you want, you cannot want it anymore because you already have it

    From Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique by Bruce Fink, loc 765: Human desire, strictly speaking, has no object. Indeed, it doesn’t quite know what to do with objects. When you get what you want, you cannot want it anymore because you already have it. Desire disappears when it attains…

  • Investigating Staff Perspectives on Generative AI: using ChatGPT to produce diagrams

    Another example of using the Diagrams: Show Me GPT to produce a visual aid which supports research. It’s not ground breaking by any means but the ability to produce a visual representation like this from a multipage word document in under a minute is a useful capacity. We had our first project team meeting on…

  • There are too many identity labels being circulated too quickly

    I’ve tended to regard identity-formation as one of the positive features of platformisation. Providing forums around which people with common concerns can congregate creates the possibility for those who feel marginalised in their local context to find connections with others: maybe I’m not so weird after all? But it’s occurred to me recently how this…

  • Science fiction publications are drowning in a sea of GAI-written submissions. Will academic journals be next?

    I argued in a keynote last December that a wave of automation in journal publishing is pretty much inevitable, if academic authors use GAI to increase their rate of publication. There’s a bleak but realistic prospect of AI-written papers being AI-reviewed by journals before being AI-summarised by authors. The scifi publication Clarkesworld recently closed submissions…

  • A worrying scam backed up by an AI-generated website

    I was momentarily thrown by this earlier today: Dear owner of https://markcarrigan.net/2021/02/28/magical-voluntarism-i-got-this/, I represent the Intellectual Property division. We have identified animage belonging to our client on your website. Image Details: https://i.imgur.com/zQo3F5t.pngLocation of Usage: https://markcarrigan.net/2021/02/28/magical-voluntarism-i-got-this/ We require that you credit our client Zodiac Casino for this image.Please add a direct and clickable hyperlink to https://www.bestonlinecasino.bet/zodiac-casino/either beneath the image or…

  • Margaret Archer’s interest in reflexivity was there from 1979

    I’ve seen a tendency to frame Margaret Archer’s interest in reflexivity as an epistemic break from her previous work. In reality this is a thread present in her work from Social Origins of Education System (1979) onwards:

  • Mania as the malfunctioning object a

    What happens if the objet a fails to function? Cited on pg 272 of Bruce Fink’s Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners: In mania…it is the nonfunctioning of object a that is at stake, not simply its misrecognition. The subject is not ballasted here by any a, meaning that he is delivered…

  • How common is counter-plagiarism within social theory?

    This was an intriguing observation by Bruce Fink concerning the “certain lackadaisicalness … built into the very reference format” which assumes in the lack of specificity of the reference that “what they are saying about that author’s work is self-evident or widely agreed upon, and that there is no need to point to any particular…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #54

  • Who would handover their life to an LLM? What about their organisation?

    This is spot on from Gary Marcus about the fundamental idiocy of trusting LLMs, barring some radical shift in the underlying technology, to act as quasi-autonomous agents: On the competence side, pretty much everything critical of LLMs that I have written in this Substack over the last couple of years becomes relevant, from the unreliability…

  • Using Google’s Gemini to talk about Lacan

    I’m not sure what to make of Gemini so far. It seems more limited than Claude and ChatGPT 4 for the free-flowing intellectual conversations I enjoy, but I can see the pedagogical utility in what appears to be a more structured (and cautious) way of presenting responses. Here’s it gently correcting my understanding of Lacan’s…

  • I sometimes find you childish, I sometimes find you mesmerising

  • How to use Claude as an editing assistant

    I need to cut 2500 words from this chapter. Please offer arguments for and against removing the final section of the chapter:

  • ChatGPT: The elephant in the room

    HT Gary Marcus It did it on second try 👏

  • On seeing ourselves through others: L. S. Lowry’s Head of a Man (With Red Eyes)

    This is how the psychoanalyst Darian Leader contextualises L. S. Lowry’s Head of a Man (With Red Eyes): The painter L. S. Lowry was caught up in a powerful relation of dependence with his demanding mother, and throughout his life he would say that everything he did had a meaning only for her. During her…

  • It just occurred to me the last five films I saw were all utterly outstanding

  • Current mood in AI generated images #53

  • What if Turnitin had pivoted towards AI assessment rather than AI detection?

    It occurred to me when reading this piece on vertical software (i.e. catering to a specific industry) how much accumulated domain expertise Turnitin has by virtue of its place within the sector. The author points out how “Many vertical SaaS incumbents are sitting on troves of highly-valuable, highly-specific customer and industry data. This gives them…

  • What will Apple’s GAI strategy look like?

    This has good coverage of Apple’s moves in the area and the reasons to believe there’s a big intervention coming from them. I wonder if the end game will be something like Rewind built into the iCloud ecosystem, which I stopped using because the continuous self/other surveillance was creeping me about. But the ability to…

  • Drawing diagrams with ChatGPT

    Thanks to Milan StĂźrmer for pointing me towards this brilliant GPT: This is its surprisingly great response to the brief request ‘draw me a diagram illustrating the main themes from Mark Carrigan’s work’: And this its diagram of the first chapter of generative AI for academics:

  • Your friendly neighbourhood social theorist version 1.0: a conversational partner to support theorising

    Here’s my first version of a GPT theoretical interlocutor, trained on 20k words of blog posts and a general vision of what a useful conversational partner would be for theorising: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-TplCn4nAO-your-friendly-neighbourhood-social-theorist I’d appreciate feedback!

  • The anti-elitist cosplaying of far-right elites

    This is a startling contribution at Davos by the Heritage Foundation President. Note the clickbait ‘goes scorched earth’ and ‘globalist elites’ used by the organisation on their own YouTube video. His organisation is leading Project 2025 which is a detailed legislative agenda, as well as plan for implementation, which even on the most charitable reading…

  • Generative AI and the legal principle that computer records must be presumed to be accurate

    Thanks to Richard Sandford for drawing my attention towards to this legal principle in the UK. Horizon was an initial sign of how totally ill placed this assumption is with regards to ever more opaque computer systems. Yet another way in which the legal system is not prepared for generative AI becoming ubiquitous. The first…

  • How a deliberately inflated housing market is strangling the UK economy

    This is really interesting from Economics Observatory. It suggests this could be at the heart of the UK’s economic dysfunction rather than simply being a symptom of other structural problems: Capital allocation First, elevated house prices might redirect capital investment towards property (typically regarded as low-productivity assets), diminishing available capital for labour in productive and…

  • Lacan’s concept of symbolic castration and political authority

    This is a great discussion of symbolic castration. One of the most fascinating but also most obscure concepts in Lacan. They immediately get to the sociopolitical implications of symbolic castration in terms of the experience of authority: the search for political figures who seem like they really know what’s going, know what that should do…

  • Riot police are stuck in the mud. Enter a wizard… đŸ§™â€â™‚️

  • How do global leaders perceive global risk?

    This is interesting from the World Economic Forum’s annual survey of “1,490 experts across academia, business, government, the international community and civil society”. It’s striking what are seen as short term risks and what are perceived as sustained risks over time:

  • Newcastle’s Dead and Abandoned Shopping Centres

    “Oh… New… Castle” 😂 had exactly the same realisation when I spent a week there in 2019.

  • What we need today is not a theory of a new age

    It’s almost 30 years since John Thompson’s Media & Modernity was published. It’s aged exceptionally well for a book about media, particularly the explanatory ethos underpinning it:

  • Well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would you want to do?

    I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #52

  • The challenge of feral sociology

    This is ChatGPT’s writeup of the talk I gave at the Edinburgh Futures Institute today for their MA students. I’m wondering if I should write this up as a paper. It led to an interesting discussion about potential strategies for engaging with feral sociology in the classroom: therapeutic approaches to sitting with anxiety, conversational skills…

  • 🦆❤️ Ciallan’s memorial duck

    I came across this in a hotel lobby earlier today. I didn’t take it because I’m now on my way home and didn’t want to leave it on a train. I was delighted to find it had left for another adventure by the time I popped back to the hotel this evening to get my…

  • The manifest and latent function of online reviews

    I found myself leaving Google reviews recently for the first time in months. In a couple of cases because I was extremely pleased with somewhere I visited, on another occasion because I was annoyed and felt the need to register this fact. Inevitably the former involved five star reviews, the latter a two star review…

  • You’re young until you’re not, you love until you don’t, you try until you can’t

    This is how it worksYou’re young until you’re notYou love until you don’tYou try until you can’tYou laugh until you cryYou cry until you laughAnd everyone must breatheUntil their dying breath

  • 📍Margaret Archer’s final book: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics

    Coming soon from Cambridge University Press. It’s a series of extended responses to critics of the morphogenetic approach, representing a final statement of her life’s work which includes a substantial number of new ideas elaborated in response to critiques.

  • Current mood in AI generated images #51

  • Is digital distraction the 21st century equivalent of neurathemia?

    Neurasthenia was a widely diagnosed condition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries explained as “a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system’s energy reserves” encompassing an expansive range of symptoms. What they had in common was a suggested cause in the stresses and strains of modernity: The condition was explained as being a…

  • How else could your time on social media be used?

    I’ve largely given up on social media at this stage, with the exception of using it to promote events. The reasons for this are complex on one level but in another way they are quite simple. It seems increasingly clear to me that the time I spent on social media could better be spent elsewhere:…

  • Generative AI beyond assessment: what could happen over the next few years?

    A presentation I’ve done a few times as a conversation starter about the big picture of GAI in higher education. I’m really enjoying the dialogues this is generating so get in touch if you’d like to invite me to come and speak about it. https://www.slideshare.net/secret/hhPQOevoBcpjdM

  • Margaret Archer’s final paper: Coincidence – A word with two meanings for explaining and predicting the future

    This was just released in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour: Connecting the critical realist morphogenetic model to insights made by Nicholas Rescher, this paper argues that our predictions are always subject to chance and contingency but nevertheless ineluctably useful for both practical and scientific inquiry. Contingency results from the causal openness of…

  • Why aren’t libertarian conspiracy theorists interested in Project 2025?

    I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that project 2025 is a highly detailed, well funded and elaborate plan to remake American democracy in the event of a Republican victory in the next election: Project 2025 is a plan to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S.…

  • I don’t like walking around this old and empty house. So hold my hand, I’ll walk with you my dear

    You’re gone, gone, gone awayI watched you disappearAll that’s left is a ghost of youNow we’re torn, torn, torn apartThere’s nothing we can doJust let me go, we’ll meet again soonNow wait, wait, wait for me, please hang aroundI’ll see you when I fall asleep

  • Why does South Manchester monopolise the economic gains of the city’s growth?

    This is very interesting from Alan Harding. It makes a compelling case that effective subnational government is associated with the better distribution of the proceeds of growth. How does this work within city-regions rather than between them? Theory tells us that the big employment centres in major conurbations generate ‘escalator’ and ‘fountain’ effects. Their well-rewarded…

  • The (thin) relational reflexivity of working with conversational agents

    It’s fragile, thin and not intelligent in any meaningful sense but I find it increasingly hard to deny that Claude is orientated towards a task here which is, in some sense, shared and has the capacity to reflect on its progress towards that task in a way supported by my evaluation:

  • A dramatisation of Freud’s Dora and Frau K

    It’s a shame the video quality is so poor because I love the idea of this: Thanks Mark Rafferty for sending

  • Current mood in AI generated images #50

  • These kids don’t play my shit I never had a top ten, maybe it’s because I sing about violence and depression  

    Note for note I go for brokeOn every song I wroteAnd every single song I write bringsFreedom to my weary mindA healing that you only findInside an intricate designOf kicks and snares and fat baselinesI flip the scrips until I find my

  • Psychoanalysis as literary tradition

    From Anthea Bell’s introduction to Freud’s A Case of Hysteria (Dora): Not only are Freud’s writings beguiling in their construction, style, and rhetoric, but they contain many profound and searching reflections on human nature. Freud is compelling, for example, when he examines why people insist on making themselves unhappy, whether by clinging to the lost…

  • On the machinic qualities of human interaction and the human qualities of the machine

    There’s a tendency in reactions to GAI to draw a dichotomy between the human and the machine while fails to account for the machinic qualities which typically govern human interaction. For example as Natale puts it in Deceitful Media loc 2008: Think, for instance, of highly formalized interactions such as exchanges with a phone operator,…

  • Lacan’s twelve-fold typology of desire: a case study of Elena Tonra’s Romance

    In Mark Bracher’s Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change he identifies the four categories of desire within Lacan’s thought, each operative in the imaginary, symbolic and real domains. This summarised on pg 20: Passive narcissistic desire: “One can desire to be the object of the Other’s love (or the Other’s admiration, idealization, or recognition)” Active narcissistic…

  • ChatGPT as the Big Other: the imagined limitlessness of knowledge

    If we imagine the speed and fluency of conversational agents continues to increase* from their present levels, what would this mean for how people habitually relate to a service like ChatGPT? One of the things which fascinate me about hallucination is the confidence with which these services tend to offer these statistically plausible but factually…

  • The first use of the phrase ‘publish or perish’ was in a 1928 journal article

    I’d always assumed this factoid which stuck in my brain years ago was misleading, invoking a different sense of ‘publish or perish’ to the modern aphorism. But having intended to check this for years, I just did and it is startlingly similar to the present discourse which is so familiar. It’s hard not to expect…

  • The value of a long-term personal blog in the next phase of GAI

    The thought which has continued to motivate me over the last year is what happens when there’s an adequate way to interrogate my blog with a conversational agents. There’s no good way to do it at present with consumer-facing services simply because it’s far too large for even a 200k context window. But 5.5k long…

  • Will OpenAI eventually resemble Netflix?

    Interesting point from Gary Marcus which feels particularly relevant when you consider how crisis ridden the end of the low interest era for Netflix was and may be again, if their current rally isn’t sustained: The choice is not between them building AI or not, it is between them building AI for free or building AI by paying for…

  • The alternative to avant-garde theorising

    The core problem with what I term avant-garde theorising is the valorsation of conceptual novelty: the idea that new vocabulary will always, or often, be a positive thing which expands our capacity to describe emerging realities. In contrast I think it too often involves a succession of turns, leaving the theoretical enterprise spinning on the…

  • Making ghosts into ancestors

    The other psychoanalytical theorist I’m drawn to is Hans Loewald. I came across his work through the Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein, instantly being captivated by Loewald’s notion of turning ghosts into ancestors. From Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein pg 200-201: The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote of transforming the ghosts that haunt patients into ancestors, through tasting…

  • We cannot do all things, become proficient in all areas, or master all fields

    One of the concepts which fascinates me in Lacan psychoanalysis is castration, which assumes a complexity which it lacks in Freud. Zizek summarises it as “the loss of something which the subject never possessed in the first place”, leaving her with “a purely potential, nonexistent X, with respect to which the actually accessible experiences appear…

  • Maybe there is some fucking magic in giving language to hidden things

    It should be clear that “truth,” as I am using it here, is not so much a property of statements as it is a relationship to the real; to hit the truth is to alight upon something that had never before been formulated in words and to bring it into speech, however haltingly or insufficiently…

  • Understanding concepts by tracing their journey through the theory/practice nexus

    I’m currently reading Bruce Fink’s superb Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners and it’s startling how much clearer obscure ideas are when you see what they mean in practice. For example the notion of the Real: It should be clear that “truth,” as I am using it here, is not so much a…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #49

  • Not only can DALL-E not spell, it can’t hide stuff either

    Interesting observation from Colin Fraser that DALL-E can’t hide things in images. I love the confidence with which it invites the reader to find the “cleverly camouflaged elephant” The “intricately hidden” elephant is not so good. The spelling is getting marginally better compared to a few months ago though:

  • “My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies”

    I’ve had this quote from C Wright Mills in On Intellectual Craftsmanship stuck in my head for the last few days. I’ve often identified with it but I feel particularly frustrated at the moment when I feel more creatively engaged with my research than I have for years. It increasingly feels like the weird intersection…

  • Why are we so bad at online meetings?

    Why do we automatically default to video calls? Why do we so often default to one hour meetings? Why do we rarely end meetings five minutes early for a break? Why is reasonable A/V quality not an expectation? Why are we so bad at online meetings? Why is the reality of hybrid working so crap…

  • There is a Wikipedia page on obsolete occupations

    What a fascinating collection of jobs “rendered obsolete due to advances in technology and/or social conditions”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations

  • Human cognition meets machine cognition, human cognition gets better

    This is an interesting account of how the game of Go changed following the success of DeepMind’s AlphaGo in 2016. He describes the ‘machine-mediated flourishing’ enabled by the release of an open source Go engine, suggesting a combination of imitating machinic moves and abandoning ‘weak heuristics’ which inhibited human creativity in the game.