Tech Essays

Metaphorical Thinking – The Cloud Metaphors

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Reading Time: 6 minutes 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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Reading Time: 7 minutes 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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Reading Time: 7 minutes 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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Reading Time: 6 minutes 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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How Ideas Cross-Pollinate to Advance Diverse Disciplines

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Reading Time: 6 minutes I always advise my people to read outside your field, every day something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections. Nobel prize winner Oliver Smithies in dialogue with writer David Epstein in Epstein’s book Range  One of the things that surprised me as a parent was how much I benefited from …

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What Holds Back Innovation

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Reading Time: 10 minutes The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. Sherlock Holmes  For at least five millennia, we used wheels for transportation, from carts to cars, trains, pushchairs, bicycles, etc. Across ages, we also had heavy trunks to carry luggage. To help with the workload of carrying bags, we used carts with wheels to transport them because wheeling bags was much easier than lugging them. But still, for all the creative minds and visionaries that humankind had across centuries, it …

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AI’s Impact on the Future of Jobs

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Reading Time: 12 minutes May you live in interesting times.   An English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse The First Industrial Revolution brought us the steam engine, while the Second Industrial Revolution focused on steel production, chemicals, electricity. The Third Industrial Revolution, called the Digital Revolution, was characterized by the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web. How will the Fourth Industrial Revolution look? Profoundly exciting and highly problematic. New vistas will open where incredible breakthroughs can happen because AI holds enormous potential. This …

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Metaphorical Thinking – the Web Metaphors

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Reading Time: 5 minutes Metaphorical Thinking – Introduction Metaphorical Thinking – the Guest Metaphor Metaphorical Thinking – the Cloud Metaphors Metaphorical Thinking – the Web Metaphors If you asked people in 1989 what they needed to make their life better, it was unlikely that they would have said a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext. Farmer & Farmer   The Internet is derived from the words “interconnection of networks”, thus a global network of networks. The Web or the World Wide Web is information accessed …

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