Mike Ryder

Author: Mike Ryder

About Mike Ryder

Writer, academic and digital communications professional. Lecturer in Marketing at Lancaster University.

Robotic consumption – what Uber’s new ‘quiet mode’ tells us about the human and the machine

22nd May 2019 Mike Ryder Comment

Taxi app Uber has announced a new ‘quiet mode’ for customers using its premium Uber Black service. By selecting the option via the app, users can order a cab where the driver is instructed not to talk. While this change has proven positive with many users, some taxi drivers have responded negatively to the new quiet mode, with some critics claiming it treats taxi drivers more like robots than human beings.

While these critics may certainly have a point, they miss the essential fact that all taxi drivers – and indeed, all humans being – behave, and are encouraged to behave, in a robotic fashion. This blurring of the human and the machine isn’t really anything new, but rather, has been going on for a very long time indeed.

If AI can write news items, they can write essays too

18th April 2019 Mike Ryder 2 Comments

There is a crisis coming in academia. It’s been looming on the horizon for quite some time, and now threatens to bring the profession into disrepute.

That problem is AI.

For many years now, AI have been used to power chat bots and digital assistants such as Cortana, Siri and Alexa. Over the years, these bots have become far more nuanced and complex. While these systems aren’t intelligent in the same way as a human being, they do a fairly good job at mimicking human behaviour, and convincing us that they are ‘real’.

Indeed, these technologies are now so convincing that it won’t be long before they are put to nefarious use. It’s already been shown that AI can write convincing news articles, and it won’t be long before they are used to write academic essays, even more complex works such as research papers and even full-length publications.

Make no mistake, this is a serious issue, and one that needs to be taken seriously. In the next few years, AI-powered essay mills have the potential to shake academia right to the very core.

Killer robots already exist, and they’ve been here a very long time…

19th March 2019 Mike Ryder 1 Comment

Humans will always make the final decision on whether armed robots can shoot, according to a statement by the US Department of Defense. Their clarification comes amid fears about a new advanced targeting system, known as ATLAS, that will use artificial intelligence in combat vehicles to target and execute threats. While the public may feel uneasy about so-called “killer robots”, the concept is nothing new – machine-gun wielding “SWORDS” robots were deployed in Iraq as early as 2007.

But our relationship with military robots goes back even further than that. This is because when we say ‘robot’, what we really mean is a technology with some form of ‘autonomous’ element that allows it to perform a task without the need for direct human intervention.

In Loving Memory of Rose Ryder (1930–2019)

3rd January 2019 Mike Ryder Comment

Nan in the late 1980s. There I am on the right!

My Nan died yesterday… I’m not sure how to feel.

It’s been coming for a while; years in fact, and in some ways it feels like a relief. She didn’t really do much in later life, and quietly lived out her final years in a tall, musty house in Ramsgate, Kent.

Yet despite her solitude, she remained ever-present in our lives, a woman who could be relied on to be stubborn and unbending in matters of elderly respectability and social pride. Despite her setbacks, she quietly soldiered on, pottering about, living one day to another with barely a shrug or complaint.

Self-publishing and the challenge of ‘marketing yourself’

2nd January 2019 Mike Ryder Comment

One of the hardest things about writing is that it inevitably leads you to bare some small part of your soul to the world. This is particularly true of fiction as the world you create is wholly your own. If someone doesn’t like your characters, then they don’t like the characters you created. Similarly, if they have a problem with the politics, or the themes of your work, then again, they have a problem with your politics, and your themes. This is quite different from other types of writing where more often than not you will be working to a set of guidelines that may constrain your work, for in this case, the work you produce is all down to you, and there is simply no place to hide.

This challenge becomes even more difficult when it comes to self-publishing. Unlike regular publishing, where you might have an editor and production team working with you to oversee the process, when it comes to self-publishing, the power is wholly in your hands. This can be a remarkably liberating step, and certainly has a number of advantages; however, it can also pose great challenges when it comes to marketing and self-promotion. On the one hand, naturally, you want to sell your work, and put it out there, but at the same time, there is a sense that absolutely everything to do rests on your shoulders, and if someone doesn’t like it, then it’s completely down to you.