Category: Uncategorized
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Stochastic flock: A new AI metaphor
Everyone who has anything to do with chatbots, generative AIs or LLMS knows about the ‘stochastic parrot’, a metaphor created by Emily Bender and colleagues in 2021. It sits on its perch and looks sternly at developers and users of these new computer technologies. At least everybody pretends to know it, because ordinary people don’t…
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Is ‘cultural technology’ a metaphor for AI?
This morning, I opened Bluesky and saw a message from Matthew Cobb alerting me to an article in The Observer on “Ten metaphors for AI” by John Naughton. Metaphors for AI, c’est moi, I thought, and indeed in the online version there is a link to one of my posts. Wow. At the same time…
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Metaphors for AI: Three blog posts and a summary
Over the last few weeks I have written a trilogy of blog posts about metaphors for AI, trying to survey emerging metaphors as well as those studying those metaphors, and calling for a metaphor observatory. Three posts is a lot to read. For those who want to have a quick overview, here is one. I…
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Hello World!
Hello, welcome to my new Making Science Public Blog. I started blogging on the old Making Science Public blog maintained by the University of Nottingham in 2012. We have transferred all the hundreds of posts that I and colleagues have written since then to this new WordPress blog, as the University will close down its…
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Science, stories and the secrets of survival
I recently read a post on Bluesky by Adam Roberts, a British science fiction and fantasy novelist that said: “MODERN MAGIC MAKES MANIFEST MERLIN’S MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES”. I was instantly hooked and found out that this is a nicely alliterative rendition of the original title of a press release announcing that “Fragments of a rare Merlin…
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Metaphors, covid and communication
There is a great event happening this evening (12 March 2025) at UCL about “Communicating in a Crisis: Lessons Learned Five Years After Covid” with wonderful speakers. As I won’t be able to be there or to participate remotely, I thought I’d quickly highlight a few things about covid and metaphors, a topic that has…
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Science and politics: Some whimsical thoughts
On Monday morning I had a lot of time. I was in hospital getting an infusion of Vedolizumab. With observation etc. that takes about three hours. I scrolled on my phone and read some posts on Bluesky, while, at the same time, reading an old novel on my Kindle – a Lord Peter Wimsey novel.…
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Making mineralogy public: George Sand and Jules Verne
On 14 January, Richard Fallon, an expert on 19th/20th-century literature and science, posted on Bluesky: “More people ought to read George Sand’s 1864 romance Laura, Voyage dans le cristal: a delirious, phantasmagoric, mineralogical story that includes a trip to a prehistoric lost world at the North Pole”. I had read some stories by George Sand…
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Synthetic biology in the era of AI: From dominating nature to collaborating with it
Today’s post is a guest post by Christian Gude. He has a PhD in synthetic biology from the University of Nottingham (where we met when I was still doing synbio and RRI at the SBRC) and is now working at Phenotypeca Ltd as IP Analyst in a multidisciplinary role between science and intellectual property. In…
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Making Science Public 2024: End of year round-up of blog posts
It’s that time of year again when I write my round-up of all the blog posts that I have written over the year. There were more posts than I expected. I have tried to group them into topics, some of which you might be interested in, others not. This year, I mostly explored the ever-expanding…