Read my latest for The Independent in full below or by following this link.
The book which gives doctors a checklist for mental illnesses – as made famous by The Psychopath Test – has been updated. But does it really work?
Mark Piesing
Recent articles & occasional own content
Why we often view digital culture through insect metaphors
Read my latest piece for Wired.co.uk in full below or by clicking on this link. The piece also appears in New York’s arstechnica here
Humanity has often looked to the insect world for its technological metaphors, and now for digital inspiration
Swarms. Hive minds. The web*.
It can be hard to avoid talking about our digital culture without using insect metaphors.
Yet for new media theorist Jussi Parikka, it may be more than just a metaphor. Parikka is reader in Media and Design at Winchester School of Art and author of the Anne Friedberg Award-winning Insect Media.
“For me Insect Media started from a realisation and a question: why do we constantly talk about digital culture and networks through insect metaphors?” says Parikka. “Is it just a metaphoric relation? If yes, why do we make sense of high technological culture through references to these small brained, rather ‘dumb’ animals? Or is there even more to this?
Predicting the future of artificial intelligence has always been a fool’s game
Read my latest for Wired.co.uk here in full or by following this link.
From the Darmouth Conferences to Turing’s test, prophecies about AI have rarely hit the mark. But there are ways to tell the good from the bad when it comes to futurology.
The web’s oldest dark art: Can spam be canned?
Read my latest for The Independent here in full or by following this link. It has also now been syndicated to papers in South Africa, The Gulf States and India.
There are 100 billion spam emails sent daily. But that number is decreasing. Does this signal the end of the web’s oldest dark art?
Nudging UK Book Discovery Toward the Mainstream
This was a couple of weeks ago now….but read my headline story for the New York based Publishing Perspectives in full here or by following this link.
Are you fed with up with the overwhelming choice offered by Amazon, or — as in my case — suspicious of their scarily accurate personalized emails, but just too lazy to go to your local book store (if you still have one)?
Beyond Asimov: the struggle to develop a legal framework for robots
Read my latest for Wired in full below or by clicking here.
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The EU-backed €1.5 million (£1.3 million) RoboLaw Project brings together a team of roboticists, lawyers and philosophers to work together to come up with proposals for the laws and regulations necessary to manage emerging robotics technologies
It is easy to be wowed by the self-driving cars showcased by Google and now Oxford University, but Dr Pericle Salvini’s job is to try to make us think about the ethical and legal implications of such robotic technology. After all, if an autonomous vehicle crashed, who would be responsible? The driver? Google? The car itself?
“Robots are no longer science fiction, as they have left the factory and are arriving in our homes,” says Salvini from the BioRobotics Institute at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA) in Pisa, Italy. And Asimov’s Three Laws simply aren’t sufficient.
The race to finger print the human voice.
Read my latest in The Indpendent and the i in full below or by following this link.
“You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.” We have all heard this 1,000 times yet we barely give a thought as to what may happen to all the recordings that the police make of their interviews. Or indeed to the somewhat more mundane equivalent: “This call may be recorded for training purposes.”
However, without your permission – or even your knowledge – your recorded voice may be about to play a key role in the race to fingerprint the human voice.
US Army backs startups in war zones in bid to reduce violence
Read my latest for Wired in full below or here…
Lieutenant General Jeffrey Talley used US Army funds to back promising Iraqi entrepreneurs to set up engineering and tech startups in a bid to lure young men away from the Iranian-backed militia. Can this strategy of “engineering the peace” be replicated elsewhere?
Six months ago Lieutenant General Jeffrey W. Talley earned his third star when he was appointed Chief of the US Army Reserve. Its 205,000 part-time soldiers form in their own right a large enough force to invade a country.
Five years ago, in January 2008, this Irish Catholic entrepreneur, academic and now full-time soldier found himself dodging IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Iraq, with a $500,000 bounty placed on his head by the Mahdi Army as he tried to restore security to the 2.5 million people who lived in the notorious suburb of Baghdad known as Sadr City.
His crime had been to realise how he could use “good old-fashioned capitalism” to defeat the Iranian-backed militia that ran the city like the “old Mafia” used to do in the USA.
Chinese investors target British university spin-outs
Read my latest for Wired in full below or follow this link
Chinese venture capitalists and angel investors are flocking to UK universities to invest in early-stage technologies. However, some spin-outs are worried about protecting their intellectual property
While the possible cyber-threat to the UK posed by Chinese multinational Huawei’s penetration of the telecoms market may be occupying David Cameron’s mind this Christmas, on our university campuses another Chinese “invasion” is taking place. And this time we are not talking about undergraduates.
What Barack Obama can teach Tesco and co
Read my latest feature article for The Independent (front page story) and the “i” in full here or click here.
The friendly big red capital letters of the email welcoming me to the world of online gambling – “WELCOME ABOARD. GAME ON” – were in marked contrast to the Orwellian feel of the site’s age-verification policy that I had found just a click away.
It promised to use a third party to electronically verify that I was who I said I was by using my name, address, date of birth and phone number, and said the results might be retained for use by other businesses in the future. It meant that whatever I shared and whatever they had on me was going to remain forever out there in cyberspace, beyond my control.
And if I’d failed the test, I may even have had to verify my identity through a Skype interview.
