Intelligence as a war game

In May 1997, millions of people, despite likely never having played a game of chess themselves, gathered around their televisions to watch chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov play. His opponent, what appeared to be a pair of six-foot-tall cupboards enclosed in a black perforated metal grille, was IBM’s “Deep Blue” chess computer. Kasparov lost, and the event …

Enough with ‘human-AI collaboration’

Describing our interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems as ‘collaboration’ is well-intentioned, but flawed. Not only is it misleading, but it also takes away the credit of AI ‘labour’ from the humans behind it, and erases and obscures an often exploitative arrangement between AI producers and consumers. In this article, I explore how the AI …

Product design and the myth of faster horses

Product design often encounters a tension between solving observable customer needs (reactive design), and inventing novel experiences without concrete basis in current customer behaviour, but which designers believe will be valuable (proactive design). Both reactive and proactive design can produce successful results. However, the practical question remains: given that most product design teams have finite …

The fundamental value of the metaverse is sensory misdirection, not replication

The “metaverse” is the collective marketing term for a set of virtual reality media experiences. It is accessed using headsets such as the Oculus Quest, Valve Index, and HTC vive. It is often presented in marketing materials as newly enabling the digital replication of physical space, despite the fact that this has always been possible …

How my online gaming addiction saved my Ph.D.

Or, how I cookie-clicked my way to a doctorate in interaction design. It’s been 5 years since I finished my Ph.D. on user interfaces for machine learning. To celebrate/commiserate, I’m sharing an unusual (if I may say so myself) grad school war story, the story of how sinking hundreds of hours into pointless online games …

Civil Partnerships are Discriminatory

Civil partnerships are often incorrectly viewed as the panacea for reconciling the views of those in favour of human rights with the views of champions of “traditional” marriage. It’s easy to see the appeal: the same-sex couples get to enjoy the same legal benefits of marriage (which, by the way, they often don’t), and the tragically …