things are a little crazy rn
Adversarial chatbots engaged in an endless back-and-forth:
This piece simulates scheduling hell by generating infinite & unique combinations of meeting conflicts between two friends.
Tags: bots
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Saturday, April 24th, 2021
Tuesday, October 20th, 2020
My chatbot is dead · Why yours should probably be too · Adrian Z
The upside to being a terrible procrastinator is that certain items on my to-do list, like, say, “build a chatbot”, will—given enough time—literally take care of themselves.
I ultimately feel like it has slowly turned into a fad. I got fooled by the trend, and as a by-product became part of the trend itself.
Saturday, April 27th, 2019
Gendered AI: Gender Presentation and Distributions in sci-fi AI | Sci-fi interfaces
Thorough (and grim) research from Chris.
Friday, December 28th, 2018
Malicious AI Report
Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.
Thursday, December 6th, 2018
WALL·E | Typeset In The Future
A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.
Thursday, October 4th, 2018
Infovore » Pouring one out for the Boxmakers
This is a rather beautiful piece of writing by Tom (especially the William Gibson bit at the end). This got me right in the feels:
Web 2.0 really, truly, is over. The public APIs, feeds to be consumed in a platform of your choice, services that had value beyond their own walls, mashups that merged content and services into new things… have all been replaced with heavyweight websites to ensure a consistent, single experience, no out-of-context content, and maximising the views of advertising. That’s it: back to single-serving websites for single-serving use cases.
A shame. A thing I had always loved about the internet was its juxtapositions, the way it supported so many use-cases all at once. At its heart, a fundamental one: it was a medium which you could both read and write to. From that flow others: it’s not only work and play that coexisted on it, but the real and the fictional; the useful and the useless; the human and the machine.
Tuesday, June 26th, 2018
Untold AI: The Untold | Sci-fi interfaces
Prompted by his time at Clearleft’s AI gathering in Juvet, Chris has been delving deep into the stories we tell about artificial intelligence …and what stories are missing.
And here we are at the eponymous answer to the question that I first asked at Juvet around 7 months ago: What stories aren’t we telling ourselves about AI?
Tuesday, February 27th, 2018
Andy Budd - De l’imaginaire à la réalité : panorama de la robotique on Vimeo
A thoroughly entertaining talk by Andy looking at the past, present, and future of robots, AI, and automation.
Monday, June 12th, 2017
Design in the Era of the Algorithm | Big Medium
The transcript of Josh’s fantastic talk on machine learning, voice, data, APIs, and all the other tools of algorithmic design:
The design and presentation of data is just as important as the underlying algorithm. Algorithmic interfaces are a huge part of our future, and getting their design right is critical—and very, very hard to do.
Josh put together ten design principles for conceiving, designing, and managing data-driven products. I’ve added them to my collection.
- Favor accuracy over speed
- Allow for ambiguity
- Add human judgment
- Advocate sunshine
- Embrace multiple systems
- Make it easy to contribute (accurate) data
- Root out bias and bad assumptions
- Give people control over their data
- Be loyal to the user
- Take responsibility
Wednesday, March 15th, 2017
Systems Smart Enough To Know When They’re Not Smart Enough | Big Medium
I can forgive our answer machines if they sometimes get it wrong. It’s less easy to forgive the confidence with which the bad answer is presented, giving the impression that the answer is definitive. That’s a design problem.
Wednesday, December 7th, 2016
After the flood | Projects | Robot Life Survey
Lovely prints!
The Robot Life Survey is an alternative-history from design company After the flood, where mechanical intelligence is discovered by man, noted and painted for posterity and science.
Monday, May 9th, 2016
Bots | A Working Library
Absolutely brilliant stuff from Mandy (again). A long hard at today’s tech industry’s narrow approach to bots and artificial intelligence compared to some far more interesting and imaginative approaches in fiction:
- Ann Leckie’s superb Imperial Radch series,
- Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, and
- Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.
So in addition to frightening ramifications for privacy and information discovery, they also reinforce gendered stereotypes about women as servants. The neutral politeness that infects them all furthers that convention: women should be utilitarian, performing their duties on command without fuss or flourish. This is a vile, harmful, and dreadfully boring fantasy; not the least because there is so much extraordinary art around AI that both deconstructs and subverts these stereotypes. It takes a massive failure of imagination to commit yourself to building an artificial intelligence and then name it “Amy.”
Sunday, April 24th, 2016
Conversational interfaces
Psst… Jeremy! Right now you’re getting notified every time something is posted to Slack. That’s great at first, but now that activity is increasing you’ll probably prefer dialing that down.
What’s happening?
Why does everyone always look at me? I know I’m a chalkboard and that’s my job, I just wish people would ask before staring at me. Sometimes I don’t have anything to say.
I’m Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on it’s way to you.
It looks like you’re writing a letter.
Your quest is to find the Warlock’s treasure, hidden deep within a dungeon populated with a multitude of terrifying monsters. You will need courage, determination and a fair amount of luck if you are to survive all the traps and battles, and reach your goal — the innermost chambers of the Warlock’s domain.
Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
ÆLFRED MECH HET GEWYRCAN
Ælfred ordered me to be made
Technical note
I have marked up the protagonist of each conversation using the cite element. There is a long-running dispute over the use of this element. In HTML 4.01 it was perfectly fine to use cite to mark up a person being quoted. In the HTML Living Standard, usage has been narrowed:
The
citeelement represents the title of a work (e.g. a book, a paper, an essay, a poem, a score, a song, a script, a film, a TV show, a game, a sculpture, a painting, a theatre production, a play, an opera, a musical, an exhibition, a legal case report, a computer program, etc). This can be a work that is being quoted or referenced in detail (i.e. a citation), or it can just be a work that is mentioned in passing.A person’s name is not the title of a work — even if people call that person a piece of work — and the element must therefore not be used to mark up people’s names.
In the examples above, it’s pretty clear that I, Pencil and Warlock Of Firetop Mountain are valid use cases for the cite element according to the HTML5 definition; they are titles of works. But what about Clippy or Little Moo or Slackbot? They’re not people …but they’re not exactly titles of works either.
If I were to mark up a dialogue between Eliza and a human being, should I only mark up Eliza’s remarks with cite? In text transcripts of conversations with Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, should only their side of the conversation get attributed as a source? Or should they also be written without the cite element because it must not be used to mark up people’s names …even though they are not people, according to conventional definition.
It’s downright botist.
Monday, February 29th, 2016
Here there be robots: A medieval map of Mars
Mappa Mundi Rubrum.
Tuesday, August 25th, 2015
dConstruct 2015 podcast: Brian David Johnson
The newest dConstruct podcast episode features the indefatigable and effervescent Brian David Johnson. Together we pick apart the futures we are collectively making, probe the algorithmic structures of science fiction narratives, and pay homage to Asimovian robotic legal codes.
Brian’s enthusiasm is infectious. I have a strong hunch that his dConstruct talk will be both thought-provoking and inspiring.
dConstruct 2015 is getting close now. Our future approaches. Interviewing the speakers ahead of time has only increased my excitement and anticipation. I think this is going to be a truly unmissable event. So, uh, don’t miss it.
Grab your ticket today and use the code ‘ansible’ to take advantage of the 10% discount for podcast listeners.
Thursday, August 20th, 2015
dConstruct 2015 podcast: Carla Diana
The dConstruct podcast episodes are coming thick and fast. The latest episode is a thoroughly enjoyable natter I had with the brilliant Carla Diana.
We talk about robots, smart objects, prototyping, 3D printing, and the world of teaching design.
Remember, you can subscribe to the podcast feed in any podcast software you like, or if iTunes is your thing, you can also subscribe directly in iTunes.
And don’t forget to use the discount code ‘ansible’ when you’re buying your dConstruct ticket …because you are coming to dConstruct, right?
Wednesday, December 17th, 2014
TARS, CASE & KIPP from Interstellar
Print out the plans, fold and glue/sellotape the paper together, and you’ve got yourself the best sci-fi robots in recent cinema history.
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014
Adactibots
I post a few links on this site every day—around 4 or 5, on average. If you subscribe to the RSS feed, then you’ll know about them (I also push them to Delicious but I don’t recommend relying on that).
If you don’t use RSS—you lawnoffgetting youngster, you—then you’d pretty much have to actually visit my website to see what I’m linking to. How quaint!
Here, let me throw you a bone in the shape of a Twitter bot. You can now follow @adactioLinks.
I made a little If This, Then That recipe which will ping the RSS feed and update the Twitter account whenever there’s a new link.
I’ve done same thing for my journal (or “blog”, short for “weblog”, if you will). You can either subscribe to the journal’s RSS feed or decide that that’s far too much hassle, and just follow @adactioJournal on Twitter instead.
The journal postings are far less frequent than the links. But I still figured I’d provide a separate, automated Twitter account because I do not want to be that guy saying “In case you missed it earlier…” from my human account …although technically, even my non-bot account is auto-generated: my status updates start life as notes on adactio.com—Twitter just gets a copy.
There’s also @adactioArticles for longer-form articles and talk transcripts but that’s very, very infrequent—just a few posts a year.
So these Twitter accounts correspond to different posts on adactio.com in decreasing order of frequency:
Friday, January 17th, 2014
Curiosity Hub
This nifty place in Brighton is just down the street from me:
Our classes allow kids to get creative with exciting, cutting-edge technology and software.
Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
▶ 100 Robots - Spaceteam - YouTube
See that helmet? That’s my helmet. Jim borrowed it for this video.
And now I think that the Future Friendly posse has a theme song.
