First week at Meta complete. Yes, really. This old dog, born long before the iPhone and social media, has joined the Kool Kids and will be “building the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.”
Read on for why I made the jump from Docusign and for my first impressions of Meta.
Continue reading “Old Dog Learns New Tricks”
Gaza Strip area: 365 km2
Gaza Strip population (2022): 2,375,259
Isle of Wight area: 381 km2
Isle of Wight population (2019): 141,606
When people face an existential threat they will fight to the death. What other option is there?
Not optimistic this cycle of violence between Israel and Palestine will be broken anytime soon. I fail to see what the plan is, on either side. Hawks in Israel seems to think they can push the Palestinians into Egypt, or kill enough that they are no longer a people; just a displaced and subjugated minority, living in a reservation.
As the old “joke” goes, the irony of the US selling/sending Apache helicopters to deal with ethnic cleansing and genocide is lost on many…
The rows of white lines is the Hornsea One or Hornsea 2 facility.
Next time you fly into Gatwick from Northern Europe take a look out of window about 30 mins before landing; you may well see one of the UK’s offshore wind facilities. The scale of these is something to behold! Row upon row of (almost) free, (almost) clean energy, with all this impressive generation capacity built up over the past 20 years.
Continue reading “UK Offshore Wind”
Anthropic recently released Claude their LLM trained to be “helpful, honest, and harmless”. Much has been written about Anthropic’s laudable approach, including their philosophy of “constitutional AI“. In this post we take a look at how Claude works in practice, and the enormous challenges posed by using natural language as a general purpose interface.
Continue reading “Ethical LLM Whac-A-Mole”
The latest advances in artificial intelligence (particularly large language models) continue to reverberate. Even for an “old school” AI person like myself (who cut his teeth with Prolog) it is clear that there has been a step change in our ability to create computer systems that can interact with humans using natural language. GPT-4 et al are exhibiting early signs of “common sense” and have encoded useful conceptual representations of the world. The debate rages on as to whether this is “intelligence”, but to an engineer like me, it sure seems useful!
Continue reading “The 8 Billion Person Question”I think remote work is a powerful tool to implement 15 minute cities which will bring wide ranging societal, ecological and health benefits.
Continue reading “Future of Work”
The written word is an amazing invention — it literally (!) allows me to transmit the thoughts in my head across space and time, and into your head. Can you imagine a more powerful force for advancing civilzation?
Continue reading “Literacy and Engineering”
As CTO for Clause Inc. I breathe the rarified air of blockchain, AI, IoT, and Legal-Tech (joke). Seriously, I do read quite widely, so in time-honored fashion, here are my predictions for 2018.
THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE
Artificial intelligence and robotics are now part of our everyday experience and zeitgeist. From Tesla and Uber advancing the state of the art in self-driving cars (and soon trucks), to robotic milking machines, driver-less trains, to space exploration, to algorithmic news filtering, summarisation and selection, to using computers to detect cancer, to military drones, many traditionally human jobs are being replaced, or augmented, by robotics, algorithms and technology.
Innovation That Matters 