Category: technology
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Pokémon Gone
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I posted some writing yesterday about Pokémon Go, a fun throwaway remark in a book chapter I’m writing for Riccardo Torta & Beatrice Villari. Little did I know that the news was emerging that Niantic Spatial had announced a partnership with Coco Robotics to use build an accurate (ahem) model of cities around the world…
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Laissez-faire Cognitive Debt
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I have been thinking a lot recently about Cognitive Debt from one particular perspective; often the need for ‘thinking’ is not being replaced, but instead just reshaped and pushed elsewhere in a system. Recap: I think of Cognitive Debt as ‘where we have the answers, but not the thinking that went into producing those answers”.…
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Paired prompting
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I was talking to Tracey Camilleri yesterday about workplace design in the the age of LLMs, and then Chris Noessel about his forthcoming book, Cognitive Debt (and the potential for Cognitive Surplus), and I have a head full of ideas and desk full of new cards. Of those, this one felt worth trying to quickly…
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Beware of Geeks Bearing Grifts
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Sometimes a little bit of wordplay goes a long way. This was inspired by Simon Wardley’s post on LinkedIn earlier, where (in his usual style), he was playing a conversation out between him and a fictitious other… X : Can you summarise the issues of AI for me?Me : No. AI is a field. However,…
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Text and Context: When code won’t load
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I was never a coder, per se. I just grew up in an era where if you wanted anything interesting to happen on the internet, you had to have just enough overconfidence in your own ability to pop the bonnet and hit some code with a hammer in different ways. And I don’t have much…
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Zuck has a performance problem
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Mark Zuckerberg has trouble performing. And I’m not just talking about his ongoing, stilted stage appearances at announcement events (Steve Jobs, he is not). It’s his AI Performance. At the 2025 Meta Connect event, the demo of the AI glasses glitched pretty badly not just once, but twice. Firstly, Mark hands over to chef Jack…
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Organisational Surface Area
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Calling Arno Penzias I want to talk about Arnos Penzias and his idea about the Surface Area of an organisation. I’ve been an EE (“Everything Everywhere”) customer for years now. I was an Orange customer before that, so just drifted over in the rebrand. I probably stayed because of inertia, but an inertia rooted in…
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Cognitive Debt
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“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts Newsletter 247 The idea of Cognitive Debt seems to have struck a chord with folk, in a good way (thank you Neil, Andrew and others who’ve…
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Writing in the age of AI
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I’ve been using Bluesky quite a bit, now that I’ve deleted Twitter. And trying out what it’s like to craft micro explorations there. The following was a series of five ‘skeets’ (no, seriously, let’s not call them that), that I thought was worth sharing here too. A thing @nicksherrard.bsky.social said this morning has been nagging me. “Maybe we’ll just…
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What is 1+1? Bot defence for beginners.
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I had a call this morning from a mystery number, with a voice purporting to be “Sarah Wilson from the Housing Repair Team”. It was obviously a bot, and as always a simple tangential question throws the limited and archaic technology they are deploying (e.g. ask a question like “What’s 1+1?” and listen to the…
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Refractive Fragmentation of the Social Web
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I responded to something Peter said this morning on Bluesky: I responded that, yes, I have been thinking about this too. And, as I’ve found useful over time, seeing the problem for individual and collective perspectives helps. Zoom in, zoom out, repeat. The problem is magnified in the macro; as much as you have your…
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The Warp and the Weft
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I was at one of Dan Hon’s Hallway Tracks yesterday, featuring special guests Deb Chachra and Georgina Voss as they talked about their respective magnificent recent books, How Infrastructure Works and Systems Ultra. Held under Chatham House* rules, there were lots of brilliant questions and directions the ninety minutes took, both in conversation and in…