Among the many steps along the road to high-performance AI, one of the most important was taken in 2007 by Fei-Fei Li, then an assistant professor in Princeton’s computer science department. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to amass many millions of small acts...
Of honey bees, long shots, and the usefulness of useless knowledge…
In a column in January about the paradox of work, I recalled the immortal Douglas Adams joke about working conditions: the hours are good, but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The joke is back already — and generative AI has flipped the script. Academics...
One of the most famous experiments in social psychology took place in the early 1950s. Solomon Asch, a professor at Swarthmore College, gathered together groups of young men for what he told them was an experiment in “visual judgment”. It was no such thing. What...
If the 21st century has produced a more prescient book, I’ve not seen it. I’m thinking of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman. The book was published in late 2005, making it the same age as this column....
Am I the only one still using email instead of WhatsApp? Perhaps so. I find it ever harder to persuade my contacts — and more vexingly, my friends — to use email for important messages instead of interrupting me with the ping of an instant message. And my failure to...
I recently described the contradictions inherent in my fitness-tracking watch. On the one hand, it had unlocked the joy of running for me, encouraging me to run further and faster and set goals I’d never dreamt of achieving. On the other, the watch could also push me...
How are you doing? Well, I hope, despite everything. And if you are, then you are just like all the friends and colleagues who sent me messages at Christmas, all of them claiming that they were also doing just fine, also despite everything. The contradiction here is...
In the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration embarked on a curious project. Officials hired thousands of unemployed writers to produce guidebooks, children’s books, local histories, collections of folklore and a variety of other essays. Some of these writers were,...