How knowledge redevelops at higher levels of abstraction, and why its still dependent on properties of the printing press
Care at the Edge of Automation – Topos Institute
Technologies don’t just solve problems, they change us. We invent technologies, and they invent us in turn, shaping our lives and worlds. This is the phenomenon that Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, in Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), called “ontological design.” It matters now more than ever—along with a second lesson they saw clearly. Technological research is always guided (and sometimes misguided) by deep ontological assumptions about, e.g., the nature of cognition, agency, and communication. If we are to create technologies that truly serve human flourishing and care, we must bring these hidden assumptions into the open and question them at their roots.
Humanism and artificial intelligence
If humanism was born with the alphabet in a literate environment and was reborn with the printing press, what becomes of it when digital technology becomes the dominant symbolic technology?
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state."
Why Hasn’t AI Made Work Easier? - Cal Newport
I’ve been studying the intersection of digital technology and office work for quite some time. (I find it hard to believe that my book, Deep ... Read more
Drawabox | A free, exercise based approach to learning the fundamentals of drawing
A free, exercise based approach to learning the fundamentals of drawing. We tackle drawing in a logical, analytical fashion inspired by concept artists and industrial designers, focusing on technical skills that can be developed with hard work and determination.
I don't know if I like working at higher levels of abstraction
AI tools push us to higher abstraction. I'm not sure I like what that costs us.
AI Literacy Across the Curriculum
As you have no doubt seen, AI is becoming ubiquitous in our lives and in the technologies we use every day. Generative AI is no longer an experimental tool, but a deployed technology in many of the…
The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.
Pupils in England are losing their thinking skills because of AI, survey suggests
Two-thirds of secondary school teachers report a decline in core abilities such as writing and problem-solving
Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model
Our first open-weights model: multimodal, Mixture-of-Experts, with controllable reasoning effort. Available to fine-tune on Tinker.
Less is more, more or less
In the age of AI, knowing what not to build might be the most important skill of all.
From bench to bot: Why AI-powered writing may not deliver on its promise
Efficiency isn’t everything. The cognitive work of struggling with prose may be a crucial part of what drives scientific progress.
Revisiting creative behaviour as an epistemic process: lessons from 12 computational artists and designers | Proceedings of the 35th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference
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