I’m just back from the Paris Conference on AI and Digital Ethics, an excellent and lively event.
The best bits were the difficult ones – the little moments of tension and conflict which poked through the collegiality and cordiality and even the impeccable Parisian hospitality.
Read moreIn Limn magazine, Oxford’s Javier Lezaun writes of mesocosms: experimental devices which allow us to observe natural interactions in a bounded and partially enclosed environment.
Specifically, Lezaun writes about polyurethane bags, mounted on hexagonal frames, which float in Taliarte harbour, on the east coast of the German island of Kiel.
Filled with water from the North Atlantic, the four-metre-long bags are used to determine how plankton responds when alkaline materials are added to seawater. Each bag contains a different quantity of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, so that different levels of alkalinity can be compared.
Scientists are doing this to explore the impact of methods which could increase the oceans’ alkalinity at scale, accelerating their uptake of CO₂.
“Can we imagine a climate future in a giant plastic bag?”, asks Lezaun.
Read moreSo: a lifetime of missing the mark, going astray, stumbling, fumbling, stuffing up, and overcooking it finally pays off – along with economist Séverine Toussaert and digital studies scholar David De Roure, I’m on the panel for the final TORCH Talk of the academic year at the University of Oxford, taking an interdisciplinary look at failure.
Come join us at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, 12.30pm-1.30pm on Wednesday, 10th June.
On Thursday 30th April, I’ll join an interdisciplinary panel of researchers for an online discussion, organised by Surveillance & Society, about Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report.
The movie is a dystopian thriller released early in the post-9/11 eraa, set in a world where the US government is beginning to use technologies to survey the future and stop crimes before they occur. The film follows a cop (Tom Cruise) who becomes targeted by the very systems he deploys to catch others before they act.
This early digital blockbuster captures a historic moment where safety and surveillance were often inextricably linked, while speaking to a future era defined by algorithmic surveillance, where our behaviors are swayed and dictated by mechanisms beyond our sight and often beyond our control.
My fellow panellists include University of Oslo media and communications researcher Professor Steffen Krueger; Associate Professor Kellie Marin of Texas State University, who specialises in research on civic participation within the surveillance state; and Malka Older, the writer, aid worker, and sociologist, who teaches on predictive fictions at Arizona State University. Our host and moderator is Texas Tech Associate Professor Fareed Ben-Youssef, who writes on the intersections between surveillance studies and popular cinema.
This interdisciplinary roundtable will consider how the competing visions of the future staged by the film echo contemporary concerns about prediction, control, and resistance in a networked world.
Sign up for the webinar via the Zoom event page for “Surveying the (Criminal) Future” .
I’m pleased to have written the accompanying notes for the upcoming exhibition Ecotones: States of Proximity, by the glass artist María Renée Morales Lam.
María Renée Morales Lam’s work has long concerned itself with unseen forces and past dynamics that make themselves visible and palpable in moments of encounter and contact. The concept of the ecotone, which lends its name to this exhibition, describes regions of transition between ecological communities – including tidal areas, estuaries, and the riparian zones which mark the edges of rivers, streams, and lakes against the land. In each of these places, materials – and life itself – may flow and exchange in valuable ways.
Here, we are invited to the meeting point of the everyday world and an artspace in which Morales Lam’s principal medium, glass, toys with our perceptions of materiality and our understanding of the properties of light.
Alongside my other duties, I’m pleased to take on a new role leading the project “Death, dying, and afterlife in the age of AI” at Oxford University – a collaboration between the Uehiro Oxford Institute and TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
Emerging capabilities in artificial intelligence create the possibility of new relationships between the living and the dead.
After physical decease, what digital entities might live on in our stead? What agency will they have? How will the underlying technologies be developed, deployed, and managed? How will identity be authenticated?
What will be the impact on how individuals, families, communities, and societies approach the end of life, its associated rituals, and the ways in which we remember those who are gone?
Our team will use scenario planning to explore these questions and more, envisaging different future contexts for the relationship between AI and the afterlife, encompassing all aspects of memorial culture, funerary practices, and posthumous existence in the digital world.
I’m one of many interviewees in the two new Ludic Narrans books by Play Story Press, a “playful oral history” of fields including gaming, mixed reality, immersive theatre, sports, interactive roleplay and more – bringing together a vast amount of research into different forms of play by Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University.
I was a guest on the latest Strategy Meets Reality podcast with consultant, strategic adviser, and ex-instructor of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Mike Jones.
Catch up on YouTube below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I made a guest appearance on the latest episode of “Not Another KM Podcast”, hosted by Brittany Persinger and Rachel Teague, to talk about scenario planning, foresight, and knowledge management.
You can find the podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you get podcasts.
My latest piece of writing, “Wise Enough for an Uncertain World: Scenario Planning and Social Impact“, can be found at the Danish social impact nonprofit Impact Insider.
It’s an exploration of how we make a measurable difference to social issues in an unpredictable world, drawing on research with the University of Oslo, the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the IMAJINE project, and Peat Hub Ireland.
If social impact means creating long-term change, then we face a difficult problem: we live in turbulent times, and the future in which our impact will unfold is deeply uncertain.
Scenario planning can help by developing multiple plausible and contrasting futures, relevant to current concerns but challenging to our assumptions. Building and using scenarios offers the opportunity to critically explore expectations, hopes, and fears about the world within which we hope to make an impact.
Scenarios can inform the design of impact metrics which embody deeper values by considering the question: What might future generations wish we had measured in hindsight?
As we consider what inhabitants of different future scenarios might value, we can then identify and design appropriate impact measures to implement today.
Read “Wise Enough for an Uncertain World” at Impact Insider.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 