Alan Blackwell's blog

AI researchers love to talk about the ethics of machine consciousness. But guess what, humans have consciousness too.

Working across cultures sometimes feels a bit like working across disciplines.

Who thought that Elon Musk’s Grok AI would become openly racist, programmed to promote the conspiracy theory that Musk’s fellow white South African immigrants were escaping “white genocide”, not just leaving post-apartheid Africa to get rich again in Donald Trump’s USA?

How would a 1990s AI engineer have designed a system to maximise inequality? And is this what we did?

ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. To understand AI, we should think harder about bullshit

Ongoing work with Nic Bidwell, our collaborator and host for the work we were doing in Namibia before interrupted by the pandemic, has led to her writing this reflective piece that I am sharing with blog readers.

How do the Black Lives Matter protests relate to the AI in Africa project, and the work of Cambridge Global Challenges?

As with so many enterprises around the world, the AI in Africa project has been suspended in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before starting the next leg of my fieldwork in Namibia, I made a side-trip to my home country of Aotearoa New Zealand, where Billie Lythberg, Rachel Wolfgramm and their colleagues have helped me to explore interpretations of AI in Maori and Pasifika cultures.

Mahlet Woreta is an Ethiopian researcher has been building natural language processing systems to improve maternal health and safety in childbirth.