On Wednesday, I went over to Method. They regularly get outsiders in to give lunchtime talks, and they asked me to deliver something for them. I worked up an edit of “How Computers (Don’t) Think“, a lecture I do for my Hyper Island students around “AI”, Machine Learning, and implementations of it such as computer vision or speech recognition. Of course, as the title suggests, it also dives into the language and manner in which these technologies are communicated, unpacking what Marvin Minsky called suitcase words, to understand that more often than not, we’re talking about counting, arithmetic, or statistics rather than new forms of cognition. (Mike Mallazzo’s recent The BS-Industrial Complex Of Phony AI is a good point of reference on this). On the way, we took in MENACE, Clever Hans, and looked at other futures for AI beyond lazy Skynet metaphors.

Re-editing and prepping that took a moderate amount of time, but the effort was definitely worth it: the talk came out the tightest it’s ever been, and better suited to a design-agency audience. I was particularly pleased to be able to talk to one of Method’s machine-learning experts (of the very much non-bullshit kind) who clarified a few points for me but otherwise was highly enthusiastic about the accuracy and clarity of the talk.

What else?

I spent an afternoon ordering parts and components for a new Foxfield kits run, which also involved a while fettling gerbers and liasing with my Chinese producer; I do some funky things with silkscreening that aren’t always straightforward to produce. That’s all ordered now, so should be coming together in the coming weeks.

I finished my studio move: all the cruft is now tidied away on storage shelves, and my storage boxes have gone. Glad to have all that dealt with.

Beyond that, some good conversations; notably, a pleasant catch-up with Max from After The Flood, about design, strategy, and the various roles that agencies serve for their clients.