I’m very pleased that Rage Inside The Machine has been shortlisted at the UK Business Book Awards 2020, in the Specialist Category!
Confluence: an event about business and the future of storytelling /
Excited to be telling a story of prejudice, algorithms, and the future at Confluence, and event in London on Febrary 7, 2020. Particularly excited because the other speakers are so interesting! The lineup includes Maja Thomas, CIO at publisher Hachette Livre, Eric Huang from Lego, Hari Patience, storytelling coach from Accenture, journalist Ravin Sampat from Tortoise Media, Actor Rianna Dearden, writer and Unbound publisher Dan Kieran, GoCompare VP Sally Foote, author David Mansfield, Yen Ooi of CreateThinkDo, Tim Wright from the National TV and Film School, Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator of Digital Publications at The British Library, Andrew Stuck from The Museum of Walking, museum consultant Judy Audas, Daniel Solomons from Byte Behaviour, and Ken Jones from Circular Software. Wow, it really should be an interesting day!
New Piece about Rage on ABC (the A is for Australia) /
New article about Rage posted on The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s site, entitled Facebook's divisive algorithms traced back to Francis Galton's 1800s eugenic theory. Thanks to Malcolm Sutton who interviewed me for the piece.
Excited to be on the Salon London Best Books of 2019 List, too /
The list of books appears in the mailing list of Salon London, but that list is really worth joining, as it includes lots of other great reads, too.
If you don’t join, you can also find this great list here.
Rage on the TechUK Christmas Reading List! /
Very proud to have been included on the 2019 Christmas Reading List from TechUK, an industry body that promotes tech business here in the UK.
Next week on BBC Radio 4... /
I’m glad to be part of The Misinformation Virus on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, December 17th, 20:00. The program is described as:
“Angela Saini investigates the lethal spread of alternative facts and discovers that the very architecture of the web amplifies dangerous pseudoscience online”
I know Angela interviewed other interesting folks for the show, so I’m very interested in tuning in myself. I hope you can listen, as well. If you miss it, the BBC says it’ll be available for download shortly after the broadcast.
Unexpected praise on CNBC /
Pleased to have seen a very insightful article on Rage at CNBC-TV18 (the website of India’s top financial news TV channel). Good to see the penetration of the book’s message to new countries and domains!
Chat about Rage on School for Startups Radio /
My conversation on School for Startups Radio (carried on 20 stations around the USA) is now available as a podcast here. As an entrepreneur myself, I thought it was important to share Rage’s message about people’s relationship with technology in this interesting forum!
Irony: Please review Rage on Amazon! /
I know, I know, it’s ironic. But to get the message of Rage out, feeding the number one book recommendation algorithm in the world is a necessary evil. So if you have read the book, can I please ask that you give it a review at Amazon (or Amazon.co.uk)? It’d be good to do it ASAP, so it gets a good few weeks of algorithm boost before the Christmas book-buying season! Thank you. Yes, I mean you.
On AI and the creative industries /
Byte the Book has put out a rather excellent writeup of a panel they put together that I was lucky enough to be on, along with Candice F., Taylan Kamis, and Alex Hardy, chaired by Mark Piesing. They even captured a good spontaneous quote from me that I’ll now have to remember to repeat:
“When the industrial revolution replaced handicrafts with mass-production, crafted products became the domain of the rich, and this may happen again. When the story you read to your child, or the care you receive when you’re old, becomes two-tiered — human-made for the wealthy; crappy and synthetic for the poor — that’s a world you’ve got to worry about.”
Thanks so much to the sponsors and organisers of this great event, I really enjoyed it
Rage down under: I'm appearing at Adelaide Writer's Week /
I’m really excited to be talking about Rage at the Adelaide Writer’s Week in March, 2020. The program is very exciting, including 2019 Man Booker International Prize-winner Jokha Alharthi, George Pell trial reporter Louise Milligan, Greek economist and activist Yanis Varoufakis, and many more! You can find a complete list of the authors appearing here (and there’s a nice writeup at the Adelaide Review as well). My appearance is a part of a multi-city Australian book tour, further details of you which you can find on the events page.
Interview on KOMO News, Seattle /
I was pleased to be interviewed by Elisa Jaffe on Seattle’s KOMONews. Click through here for online audio.
You might also like... /
Given that most book recommendations people see these days are those of algorithms, I thought I’d do something more human, and add a list of books people who like Rage might find of interest on the website. You’ll find that page here.
On Radical Uncertainty, “Phantastic Objects”, and Blowing Bubbles (a Podcast) /
Many of you will find a recent Jolly Swagman Podcast interesting. It features my long-time collaborator psychoanalyst, economist, and founder of the UCL Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty, David Tuckett, in conversation. He discusses his theory of conviction narratives, and along the way, recommends some interesting books, including Rage! You can find links to listen to the podcast and the complete book list here.
Talking about Rage on The BBC Science Focus Podcast /
“I think this is one of the best interviews Focus has ever done - really insightful and topical.” So says the MD of the production company.
I also think it is a good one, and I’ll give due credit to the producer and interviewer Alexander McNamara
The piece is called Are algorithms inherently biased? and you can click through to listen.
The Great (Human) Anti-Hack (new piece in The Startup, via Medium) /
“The medium is the message” has never been truer than it is for social media. The natural dynamics of that media, plus the algorithms that are essential to it, encourage social division, what I call digital segregation. And that leads to digital gerrymandering, and the manipulation of us all, of the sort revealed in the must-see documentary, Netflix’ The Great Hack.
It’s also what the analytical results from colleagues of mine (and I) at UCL indicate. But in this new piece on The Startup (a Medium publication), I try to suggest (based on those results) how we might be able to change all that, hopefully in time for 2020 (and maybe even an upcoming UK general election).
Robots Can Do Our Jobs? No: That’s Algorithmic Pseudoscience at Work /
The FT has just published a new article (paywalled) entitled Workplace automation: how AI is coming for your job, which draws its analysis from a PWC report on the future of work, which in turn bases its methodology on the famous Frey and Osbourne paper that I describe in detail in Rage. And coincidentally, I’ve just this morning published a new article on that subject, entitled Robots Can Do Our Jobs? No: That’s Algorithmic Pseudoscience at Work, in The Startup (a Medium publication).
I believe this new variety of infographic rich, methodologically obscure, algorithmic pseudoscience is a rising problem. And, ironically, the more algorithms do our job of reasoning (as is the case in most studies and articles on the “future of work”), the worse this problem will get.
Radio/TV Interview on Rage: Rising Up with Sonali /
I was lucky enough to be interviewed last night by Sonali Kolhatkar on her show, Rising Up with Sonali, which will be carried on 18+affiliates of the Pacifica Radio Network, as well as FreeSpeechTV.org. Have a watch, and if you find it interesting, you'll find much more in-depth in the book!
A Bookshelf Moment... /
Exciting and gratifying: my friend Steve sent me this picture of Rage proudly displayed as a “feature book” at Waterstones Westfields in London. It’s with some good company, including Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future (which I’m ordering right away, as I admire Mr Mason’s work, and his book seems to have a message quite resonant with things in Rage).
The writeup card below Rage reads “Is technology really apolitical and morally neutral? A timely warning for our AI age.”
"Brilliant": Great New Review of "Rage" /
Unexpectedly, there’s been a great new review of the book from George Ernsberger at The Shawangunk Journal. He said “A brilliant — not glaring but illuminating — introduction to a nasty flaw that’s all but endemic in the “thought” processes of artificial intelligence designs…” Full Review Here.