A couple of weeks ago I visited the Swedish Parliament (Sveriges riksdag) to attend an award ceremony. My supervisor got the School for social sciences at Södertörn University to nominate my bachelor’s thesis for an award issued by the Swedish Parliament.
On long, hard thoughts
Right now The Ezra Klein Show has a series of podcast episodes on artificial intelligence (just like early 2023). Yesterday I listened to the discussion with Nilay Patel (of course I recommend it). Among the things they discussed was how hard thinking was at risk of being discarded with the introduction of A.I. programs such as ChatGPT 4 or Claude.
Book review: How To Do Nothing
Jenny Odell, an artist and former teacher at Stanford University, wrote a book on how to do nothing (resisting the attention economy), published in 2019, on… many things. Usually, it’s classified as related to technology (and/or science), which can confuse a reader like me, because it’s not about merely about tech’s (contemporary) inherent obsession with attention, but about being present, bonding with and relating to other beings, forgetting yourself.
Technoreligion: youth and grown-ups
It’s fascinating how much the grown-ups want to keep squeezing their own phones. No matter how much youth suffer or are exposed, we simply can’t let go of the screen ourselves. When will it stop?
The debate on hybrid warfare and Russia
During the conference Society and defense (Folk och Försvar), the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces said that the Swedish people must acknowledge the contingency of war. It caused an outcry. Presumably, this is posed as a fact to make people realize that we cannot be the ever-present observer, never involved or engaged in truly troublesome things with exogenous causes. We tend to have an immunized perception of catastrophes. What disturbs me is rather how the term of hybrid warfare is used. It’s misleading, to say the least.
Book review: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing
As soon as I noticed a book published with this savvy title this year, I knew I had to read it: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in five Extraordinary Hacks. In his youth, Scott J. Shapiro spent much time with computers, but later chose a career in philosophy and law. When writing about cyberwar, he returned to computers, re-learning programming and computer science. Attempting to answer the simple questions of why the Internet is insecure, how do hackers exploit insecurity and how they can be prevented, or at least decreased in numbers, Shapiro takes us on a journey with five stops, from the late 1980’s to the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the Minecraft wars.
Swedish economy – still in free fall
Listening to certain “experts” is like watching a very bleak comedy, French style. They seem bent on negating anything that proves a crisis is coming. The employment rate is going strong, the housing market will soon rise again, Riksbanken (the central bank) won’t increase the interest rate further… If you borrow too much money, one day you’ll have to pay.
Democracies in time
Russian authorities are trying hard to foil Swedish plans to join NATO, and try to vie “experts” to argue for the sake of Russia. I still assert democracies should help Russia lose on the battlefield. No one should even consided abandoning Ukraine. You stand by your promise, by your friends.
Book review: Quantum Supremacy
Lately, I’ve become interested in quantum computing and wrote a short paper on the subject, combining the search for quantum computers and equality. As a brief introduction I bought Michio Kaku’s new book.After some initially wild assertions Michio Kaku delves into the real stuff: quantum theory and quantum mechanics and it gets exciting!
Book review: Weapons of math destruction
Cathy O’Neil is a computer scientist and mathematician, who left the academic life for the financial industry in the early 2000’s, working with computers, for companies making lots of money. There she discovered what is now called Big Data and later became troubled by the purposes and intents of algorithms. After realising the even more troublesome side effects on society, she thus wrote this book, with the secondary title How Big Data increases inequality and threatens democracy.