Category Archives: Blog

The politics of knowledge

This is an extended version of an article published in The Conversation on 9th January 2024.


In January 1948, Life magazine published a feature showcasing the ‘102 Great Ideas’ of Western civilization, arrayed in index boxes covering topics from #1: Angel to #102: World. The project was the brainchild of Robert M. Hutchins, then chancellor of the University of Chicago and director of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Hutchins and his team had identified what they believed were the 432 ‘basic great books’, which the Encyclopedia planned to publish in a 54-volume set. To go alongside this collection, Hutchins commissioned a team of researchers to prepare an index so that readers could navigate the complex body of work. The result was displayed as part of an extended article in Life magazine, featuring a large double-page spread in which more than a dozen tired looking indexers posed alongside the output of five years’ work and nearly a million dollars of investment.

While the index was certainly an impressive achievement, at a time before computers were widely available, the results pose more questions than answers. Who exactly decides what counts as knowledge? Who decides which books should be included and which books left out? In this case, all 432 of the ‘great books’ were written by men. Indeed, the subject of ‘Man’ was even given its own chapter in the index, while ‘Woman’ only featured as a sub-category of ‘Family’, ‘Man’ and ‘Love’.

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Can Chat-GPT coach the business leaders of tomorrow?

Business coaching: two women having a meeting, sat at a large wooden desk.

AI-powered content creation is the new ‘big thing’ in the world of business and marketing. Many readers will be familiar with Chat-GPT – a large language model that uses advanced algorithms to generate ‘natural’ language responses to questions.

But while the answers may often appear intelligent, Chat-GPT isn’t ‘thinking’ about the questions we ask it in the way that a trained researcher might. Rather, it produces answers based on what it thinks a good answer should look like.

This is a subtle yet important difference.

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San Francisco U-turn on ‘killer robots’: Are we any safer as a result?

In December 2022, San Francisco lawmakers voted to overturn a decision to allow police robots to wield deadly force.

In a controversial policy proposal, the 17 robots currently used by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) could have been equipped with explosive charges to take out active shooters or suicide bombers in ‘emergency’ situations.

While the policy was initially approved by lawmakers, officials have since overturned the policy in response to pressure from civil rights groups.

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The biopolitics of the bird-flu pandemic

Bird flu pandemic: chickens in coop

There’s a pandemic on don’t you know.

Or maybe you don’t: that’s the problem. Across the globe now, millions of birds have died, and many more have been put to slaughter in order to try and curb the spread of the deadly strain of bird-flu that has ravaged its way through swathes of the global bird population.

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