Tech Essays

Children of the Magenta Line

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As a software engineer, I regularly use AI and tools like Copilot in my work, all well within our company’s privacy policy. In some ways, these tools genuinely boost my productivity, but they also stir up constant questions: Will automation make my job redundant? Will companies rush toward AI and leave essential manual skills behind? Yet, after years spent learning in public through this blog, I learnt to pay more attention to the past to better understand the future. History, as journalist Norman Cousins …

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A Timeline of Communication Patterns – What Comes Next (part 3)

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Articles in the series: A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Introduction (part 1) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Recurring Themes (part 2) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – What Comes Next (part 3) Our previous analysis reveals that societies selectively innovate based on their most deeply held values and most pressing constraints. AI development follows a similar pattern of selection. Just as Mesopotamian writing systems emerged for transactional clarity (tracking grain, livestock, and debts), AI prioritizes structured data over visual flair, parsing massive …

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A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Recurring Themes (part 2)

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Articles in the series: A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Introduction (part 1) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Recurring Themes (part 2) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – What Comes Next (part 3) As described in the previous article, communication technologies compressed time and space, creating shared experiences across vast geographic and historical dimensions. Innovation through Constraints Throughout history, we observe a pattern where new communication methods emerge precisely to overcome the constraints of their predecessors. Consider how clay tokens addressed the fundamental …

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A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Introduction (part 1)

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Articles in the series: A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Introduction (part 1) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Recurring Themes (part 2) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – What Comes Next (part 3) Smiling, touching, watching, copying, talking, listening, singing, dancing, painting, writing, and making; these are the ways we have always connected with one another. From cave paintings to the latest AI models, our methods of communication have been shaped by the culture in which we are born, power hierarchies, and the …

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Metaphorical Thinking – The Cloud Metaphors

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Metaphorical Thinking – Introduction Metaphorical Thinking – the Guest Metaphor Metaphorical Thinking – the Cloud Metaphors Metaphorical Thinking – the Web Metaphors The ethereal, shape-shifting quality of clouds makes them a perfect instrument for concepts that apply to metaphors, meditation, behavioural science, or computer science. I am on cloud nine. Every dark cloud has a silver lining.  I have my head in the clouds.   Cloud Computing In the remarkable Dictionary of Symbols by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, clouds are defined as “instruments of apotheosis and epiphany” and “clouds were connected with the symbolism of …

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The Dangers of AI Fast Fashion Content

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The shock brought by the release of ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art chatbot from the AI research laboratory OpenAI, will redefine how we relate to writing. ChatGPT is an extensive language model trained on a dataset of billions of words and can generate human-like text. It was all good and fun to ask ChatGPT to rewrite Bohemian Rhapsody as the life of a postdoc, how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James version of the Bible, generate essays or Harvard applications in seconds. But the AI …

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How to Counteract Disinformation

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The last few years exposed more than ever the fragility of our information ecosystem. Elections, Brexit, social unrest, COVID-19 conspiracies, and the war in Ukraine have been used as disinformation operations by certain actors to undermine faith in governments, raise fear and anger, confuse and manipulate us.  Disinformation is information meant to deceive (trolls posting fake news). In contrast, misinformation is false information with no malicious intent (our friends and family genuinely believe in disinformative content and willingly share it).  Why is Disinformation Effective?  …

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How Elden Ring Tests the Player’s Learning Ability

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Note: I wrote this article in collaboration with my husband.  Hidetaka Miyazaki grew up in an impoverished family in Shizuoka, Japan. Although he didn’t fully understand English, he borrowed many English fantasy and science fiction books from his local library. The boy let his imagination fly and fill the language barrier gaps by creating stories from the books’ illustrations, a skill that would prove helpful in a few decades. Later, he would say about his childhood: Unlike most kids in Japan, I didn’t have a dream… I …

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