How To Kill Your Tech Industry

A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages (PDF)

Alan Kay’s initial description of a “Dynabook” written at Xerox PARC in 1972.

Growing role of artificial intelligence in our lives is ‘too important to leave to men’

Here’s a snowclone I can get behind: X is too important to be left to men.

I am convinced that it is not the girls that must change, but rather society’s view of “computing” and the whole culture of the computing industry.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, this is about to get really serious. There are worrying signs that the world of big data and machine learning is even more dominated by men than computing in general. This means that the people writing the algorithms for software that will control many automated aspects of our daily lives in the future are mainly young, white men.

A Brief History of Women in Computing – Faruk Ateş

An excellent rebuttal of that vile manifestbro, and an informative history lesson to boot.

You can’t cherry-pick a couple of scientific studies you like and use them to justify your arguments against diversity programs, while carefully ignoring the mountains of other scientific studies that show both how and why diversity programs are good, beneficial to all, and worth investing in.

I wish I could be this calm in refuting pseudoscientific bollocks, but I get so worked up by it that I’d probably undermine my own message. I’m glad that Faruk took the time to write this down.

1995 Vannevar Bush symposium: closing Panel

So Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee walk into a panel…

Rise of the Ghost Machines - The Millions

This thing that we’ve been doing collectively with our relentless blog posts and pokes and tweets and uploads and news story shares, all 30-odd years of fuck-all pointless human chatterboo, it’s their tuning fork. Like when a guitarist plays a chord on a guitar and compares the sound to a tuner, adjusts the pegs, plays the chord again; that’s what has happened here, that’s what all my words are, what all our words are, a thing to mimic, a mockingbird’s feast.

Every time you ask AI to create words, to generate an answer, it analyzes the words you input and compare those words to the trillions of relations and concepts it has already categorized and then respond with words that match the most likely response. The chatbot is not thinking, but that doesn’t matter: in the moment, it feels like it’s responding to you. It feels like you’re not alone. But you are.