Catmachine

Sometimes a craze is just a craze. In the 1950s they were pushing the Atomic Age and added radioactivity and atoms to branding for everything. You could even buy a toy atomic energy lab with real uranium. I am strongly reminded of the way they're adding AI to everything now whether it's useful or not. I hope that in a few years this mAInia will have died down and we can just carry on creating as we did before. In fact more than that; I'm hoping that before long we'll arrive at a point where "AI-free" becomes a badge of quality so the market will HAVE to sit up and take notice, rather than telling us we’re doing Being Consumers all wrong. However, I do like to think I'm not being New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hack here. AI definitely has a place. For example, analysing large scientific datasets, archive entry labelling. You know the incredibly tedious stuff that humans would find mindnumbing or actually impossible to do. I don't think it has a place...

I like to think I’m a rational person, but nevertheless I love a good ghost story. However I have noticed a tendency for some people to seize on rationalism as Something To Believe In which seems to miss the entire point of the mindset. I think of this viewpoint as Born Again Scepticism because it most often afflicts people who were really into Weird Shit when they were younger but became disillusioned by Weird Shit’s constant failure to deliver. Born Again Scepticism espouses a kind of knee jerk “because it doesn’t exist!” holier than thou attitude to anything that isn’t scientific canon and is evangelical about deploying it. Born Again Sceptics are usually not actual scientists. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Carl Sagan – who most definitely was a scientist – said: “No matter how unorthodox the reasoning process or how unpalatable the conclusions, there is no excuse for any attempt to suppress new ideas, least of all by scientists committed to the free exchange of ideas.”...

Language evolves we are told so there’s no point in complaining about misuse of a word or phrase. If enough people use and understand it in a certain way then that way becomes correct no matter what some old dictionary might say. It may be frustrating to those of us who like things to be neat and make sense, but you know what? Fair play to language for moving with the times and being flexible. The details of jokes and idioms also change meaning. For example, there’s a common expression that Londoners consider everything “North of Watford” to be the actual north. Most people think this is funny because Watford is actually on the edge of London, pretty much where the M1 makes a serious attempt to reach escape velocity and climb out of London’s gravity well. However I remember the expression being “North of Watford Gap” in the 1980s and 1990s which made a bit more sense as that’s a service station 65 miles further up the M1 which feels more like the gateway between the North and South. Th...