Blog - Christopher Roosen

A recent headline, ‘How to prevent AI from lying to you,’ is the latest in a trend of anthropomorphising this new world of complex machine learning systems.

The whistle blows, steam bellows, the wheel turns, and a mist hangs above the churning paddles as the steamer ploughs the endless river.

What happens when we enter an era where one technology (word and image models) can automate the production of another technology (words and images), to the extent that we feel we’re drowning in the volume of material produced?

I typed these words while sitting with my laptop, with a hot cup of oat-milk coffee in my hand.

Intellectual Property law is a recent innovation in social policy which formalises a millennium of assumptions about who owns a thing, has authority over its dispersal, or profits from its use in the world.

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”

What happens when truth becomes completely relative, prone to change on the flip of a few bits and bytes?

The humble elevator button serves as an everyday, but interesting, example of how technology tells stories of its patterns of use.

When we say a message, or communication is ‘set in stone,’ we’re usually talking metaphorically; that something is immutable and unchanging.

“I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force.

“English Food” by Professor Diane Purkiss is a delightful, scholarly, and engaging tour through the history of English food.

Technology commentatorazzi risk being a one-trick pony; all aggresively negative analysis and no upside.

I’ve been moving towards a position that ideas, concepts, phrases and even larger social, political and economic frameworks are all a type of sociocultural technology build with intention to engineer society and culture.

That dangerous golden cup from which we sip, hoping for reward; or knowingly offer to others to gain power, but end up poisoning ourselves.

“What we needed to know about cars… is not how to use them but how they use us.

Despite all the recent froth, conversational Large Language Models don’t imply, need, require, or suggest consciousness.

My ten-year-old self lives on within me, especially when I look at the ‘classic’ 1980s and 90s era pictures of space-envisioning.

It’s interesting how changes in language both affect and reflect society.

The recently coined, AI-induced ‘Brain Fry’, appears as a new condition; something unique to our use of Large Language Model algorithms.

There is no more humbling and inspiring image than the Earth alone against the darkness of space.