‘Why’ beats ‘what’

Photo of calipers

How are you doing?  I’m still not dead yet. But that doesn’t tell you anything useful about how I’m doing – I might be scaling mountains at the weekend; I might be bed-bound and miserable. ‘Not dead yet’ doesn’t tell you much – just like a company’s revenue, margin and active users don’t reveal all that much about how they’re …

Shared realities: the ontology of tech

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had cause to do some thinking about Voice Assistance Technology, specifically what kind of ‘personality’ these things should have. When the topic was first raised, my instinctive response was that it was the wrong question. It took some further mulling and conversation to work out exactly why. TL;DR: in order for trust – and, by …

Inadvertent dinosaurs [post 49/100]

[NB: The blogging hiaitus is still on – due to a few personal matters, I’ve needed to reduce my areas of focus. I plan to pick it up after the summer holidays and finish these 100 posts I so recklessly allowed myself to get muscled into all those months ago. In the meantime, this post demanded to be written, so …

Bring on the noise [post 44/100]

How many questions a day is the average human prepared to answer? When I was in school, days when we were asked loads of questions were scary – they were exam days, or worse, pop quiz days. Most questions were asked person to person, and were related to events that were shared between those people or the wider community. Maybe …