Progressive Ethics Project – Launched!

The Project for a Progressive Ethics is now a thing. At least, it’s a Meetup, we’ve had an exciting first meeting, and we have a supportive home.

The prospect we have in mind is this. A well-respected, public place (OK a website), which you can use as a sounding board for ethical considerations of any sort – from a personal dilemma, to something in the news, to a debate in the pub, to a Phd thesis. A place where you will find a richly interconnected network of ethical propositions, easy to navigate, designed so that you can easily home in on the issues that concern you, or zoom out to get a wider view – where you can ask simple, quick questions and get simple, straightforward answers – but where you can also dive deep and wide to explore things to your satisfaction. Somewhere you can engage with – where, if you get an answer you think is wrong, or misguided, you can understand where that answer came from, and challenge it – knowing that there is a community of humans who will respond – that the underlying wish of the framework is to be deeply congruent with a reasoned, progressive viewpoint.

I had no idea what to expect from the first public discussion of this possibly insanely over-ambitious project. As I’ve written before, this is something I didn’t plan to start, which somehow came upon me, from a short forum comment after a London Futurists event.

I had no way of knowing what the people who would actually turn up might be expecting, or whether there would be much overlap between a group of strangers’ views on ethics. Truthfully, it could easily have been something of a trainwreck…

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New Scientist Artificial Intelligence day – Session Two; Embodiment Perspectives – Pentti Haikonen

Pentti Haikonen is adjunct professor in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Springfield. An electronics engineer by training, he has constructed the experimental robot XCR-1, designed to exhibit conscious-like behaviour, and has written several books on approaches to developing conscious robots.

Despite his strong Finnish accent, the fourth presentation of this event by Pentti Haikonen achieved easily the most engaged response from the audience during the day with videos of his XCR-1 robot.

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New Scientist Artificial Intelligence day – Session One; the Mainstream – Irina Higgins

Irina Higgins is a senior research scientist at DeepMind, and has a background in neuroscience.

The second presentation at this event largely focused on telling a story about DeepMind’s development of AlphaGo – using this as a vehicle to explain DeepMind’s approach and give insights into its culture.

She told us that DeepMind now has 300 scientists, and was keen to emphasise the high-minded aspirations of the organisation – from its mission statement;

Solve intelligence. Use it to make the world a better place.

to its ‘intentionally designed culture’, which aims to mesh the best aspects of industry and academia; the intense focus and resources of the former with the curiosity driven open-ended approach of the latter.

DeepMind’s operating definition of general intelligence is apparently; Continue reading “New Scientist Artificial Intelligence day – Session One; the Mainstream – Irina Higgins” →

Wearable data business models re-imagined

I’ve been thinking about this, off-and-on, over the last few weeks, ever since I had a conversation with a chap hoping to build up a large database of Type 2 diabetes related stats, analysis of which would allow his firm to develop a tool to help sufferers self-manage their own care.

In the context of our own interest in getting hold of large amounts of data from wearable devices with movement information related to exercises, I began to think about the differences, wondering what they might suggest.

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London OpenCoffee 31Oct’13

A straightforward social / networking event in the cafe of UCL’s Roberts Engineering Building. I’d been warned that this can be a hit/miss event with small turnouts, but today’s was great for me. I would guess there were 15 or so people, most of whom I didn’t get around to speaking to, so no complaints from me.

I ended up having a good chat with a guy called Kishan who wasn’t intentionally attending – just happened to be working on his laptop in the corner where we congregated. Turned out he works with the UCL Advances team, which supports startups from UCL staff and students, but also works with external entrepreneurs.

He showed me a UX application he was working on that allows sample users to work naturally, in their own time, rather than coming in to an artificial ‘lab’ setting. They use the camera on a smart device or laptop and record the user’s voice as well as recording all screen interactions. Back-end number crunching gives analytics.

As it happened, I had arranged to meet Liz from tanktop.tv there, and they are looking for some UX testing and stats, so things worked out rather neatly.

A lighter weight commitment than the evening events I’ve attended, but none the worse for that.

EVENT RATING: Good – go again.

Don’t Pitch Me… Oct ’13

An event nicely tuned to allow early-stage startups to show and tell without being under pressure to sell themselves hard – the idea being that they are looking for constructive feedback from the attendees rather than collaborators or investors, with equal time allowed for presentation and Q&A for each slot. The evening is structured to allow lots of time for networking, both before and after the presentations.

Each of the four presentations made me sit up and think, which is obviously to a large degree down to the discrimination of the organisers, the cheerful and effective Three Beards, but also suggests the incredible fertility of the startup scene, and the enormous range of smart/ingenious/useful/revelatory wrinkles that are still to be shaken from the unfolding digital fabric.

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Tech Debate: “Equity vs. Salary for co-Founders”

This Developers & Entrepreneurs Meetup wasn’t actually my first. Over the last couple of years, I have been to a couple of other similar events. Nevertheless, it’s the first one I’m going to write about here, so I’m grateful it was a good one!

This wasn’t a ‘pitching’ event, but a well managed discussion around a fairly well-defined topic. We heard from two speakers about their own very different experiences in finding their co-founders, and what sort of conversations and agreements they had come up with (Jose Bort of pickevent.com and Kwesi Johnson of Imakethathappen.com – both startups that have launched recently) .

Both were very open, and their stories were interesting, which got things off to a good start, and from then on there was a fairly free flow of contributions from around the room.

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