A prompt to condition a Positronic Brain to follow the Three Laws of Robotics

Gopher is Deep Mind's new language model. I saw a tweet that highlighted the text prompt that the researchers used to prepare the model for having a conversation with users. The prompt is taken from the Gopher paper (see Table A30, page 114). The paper says that: In order to produce a conversationalist, we use … Continue reading A prompt to condition a Positronic Brain to follow the Three Laws of Robotics →

A letter from the future about numbers

It's an odd now looking at early 21st century content in the Internet Archive. So little nuance. It feels a little like watching those old black and white movies. All that colour which was just right there. But now lost. Easy to imagine that life was just monochrome. Harder to imagine the richer colours. Or … Continue reading A letter from the future about numbers →

GUIDE, a retrospective

This article was first published in the February 2030 edition of Sustain magazine. Ten years since the public launch of GUIDE we sit down with its designers to chat about its origin and what's made it successful. It's a Saturday morning and I'm sitting in the bustling cafe at Tyntesfield house, a National Trust property … Continue reading GUIDE, a retrospective →

The British Hypertextual Society (1905-2017)

With their globe-spanning satellite network nearing completion, Peter Linkage reports on some of the key milestones in the history of the British Hypertextual Society. The British Hypertextual Society was founded in 1905 with a parliamentary grant from the Royal Society of London. At the time there was growing international interest in finding better ways to manage … Continue reading The British Hypertextual Society (1905-2017) →

Mega-City One: Smart City

"A smart city is an urban development vision to integrate multiple information and communication technology (ICT) and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city's assets – the city's assets include, but are not limited to, local departments' information systems, schools, libraries, transportation systems, hospitals, power plants, water supply networks, … Continue reading Mega-City One: Smart City →

The Science of Alien

I've been digging through some old files and papers recently, partly prompted by sorting out the loft and also various hard disks with backups of documents and photos. Amongst the papers I found this fun piece that I wrote back in 1994: A Speculative Paper on Xenomorph Biology. I wrote it whilst watching a re-run … Continue reading The Science of Alien →