Last week, a man in the US entered an artwork in a competition and won first prize in the digital art category with a work called “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” As reported by Vice: The image is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stare through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape. It is beautiful,…
The suspension of a Google engineer called Blake Lemoine, who claimed an AI (artificial intelligence) in the form of a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being, has stimulated a lot of comment over the past few weeks following the story’s publication in the Washington Post. It formed the starting discussion that Shel Holtz and I had in this month’s long-form episode 263 of the For Immediate Release podcast,…
If 2021 was the year of growing awareness of a thing called a ‘non-fungible token‘ – NFT for short – 2022 looks like it will be the year of better understanding of NFTs, what you can do with them as representations of goods (real as well as digital), and an appreciation of the power of cryptocurrencies in this Web 3 supply chain. As more companies start making moves into NFTs – like Selfridges and the Associated Press to name just…
Suspicion about the consequences and outcomes of the #10YearChallenge meme on Facebook kicked off discussion in the January episode of “The Hobson & Holtz Report”, aka FIR podcast episode 172. Is it just a harmless meme? Or is it a surveillance nightmare? Shel and Neville weight in. Here’s the line-up of all the topics that caught our attention and prompted lively conversation in this episode: Lost trust in Facebook led to wariness about a user-generated meme. Adobe is bringing part…
Show notes for this episode written by Thomas Stoeckle. “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” A modern version of this 18th century thought experiment by the philosopher and cleric George Berkeley might read: “If the EU fines a big tech firm billions of dollars, and no one has the power to enforce it, has it actually happened?” A recent opinion piece on AdExchanger discussed the connection…
