Tech

This, here, is a good exercise and analysis for any of us who write online (or write at all, I suppose, but for most of us that’s online). Blink if you’re human If you haven’t read it before reading this – and you should read it at some point, at least – it teases apart what could count as “writing with AI”, and argues that rather than either getting all ban-heavy, or requiring labelling of AI-written material, better simply for those of us who write for ourselves to be transparent about how we do what we do....

Wrestling with the theory of Artificial Intelligence is not a new thing. Two books have occupied space in my head for many years now that still have some of the best questions, at least – The Emperor’s New Mind Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid What they have in common is that they attempt to deal with consciousness, and they take Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as a basis for it....

When I was at school, I was oddly serious about school projects. I had a mild obsession with making them look like professional books or brochures. We didn’t have a computer, but I steered my parents into getting a proportional-spacing typewriter and used that (which dates this), and a photocopier to change sizing of chunks of text. I also scraped together enough cash to get a DeVilbiss Super 63A airbrush, an old second-hand compressor, and rigged a system that let me use the compressed air at my homemade homework desk....