AI can produce better answers than ever. The harder question is whether any of us will actually do anything with them. By Bruce Lloyd, London in conversation with Frank Peters, Cleebourg. “How do you get an AI to fulfil its New Year’s resolutions?” The question came up during a conversation about the knowing-doing gap, and…
Frank Peters and Bruce Lloyd begin with a question about the future in 2050. They end up somewhere rather more familiar: human nature, political power, ordinary decency and why having a sensible answer is not the same as getting anybody to act on it. By Bruce Lloyd, London. “Morning, Frank.” “Good morning, Bruce. How are…
Bruce Lloyd, London and Frank Peters, Cleebourg. AI can produce more information than any of us can absorb. The harder question is what we choose to do with it — and whether asking better questions may matter more than having more answers. I had been watching Bruce’s output for some time, and there was something…
By Bruce Lloyd in London & Frank Peters in Cleebourg. We worry about whether artificial intelligence will escape our control. But perhaps the deeper question is older and more ordinary: how much of modern life already depends on trusting people we will never meet? Frank told Bruce a story from his days as a receptionist…
By Bruce Lloyd, in London and Frank Peters, in Cleebourg. Five hours, a broken website, one human mistake and one AI mistake. Somewhere in the repair job sits a more useful story about trust, judgement and our rapidly changing relationship with AI. At about ten o’clock one evening, I uploaded an update to a plugin…
By Bruce Lloyd, The United Kingdom and Frank Peters, France. I arrived with my head full of programming. Bruce arrived with questions. Somewhere in the untidiness between the two, we found something worth talking about. I walked into my conversation with Bruce badly prepared. Not deliberately. I had simply been engrossed in something completely different….
AI can make it easier to stop thinking. Bruce and I found ourselves wondering whether its greater possibility is exactly the opposite: giving us the freedom to think much further than we could before. I had been reading three of Bruce’s recent pieces. One was about social care, another asked what might happen if artificial…
Before sitting down with Bruce, I watched three of his recent AI presentations. Bruce had asked AI to write rubbish, reconsider what it means to be good and explore how human beings might survive the AI age. I came to our conversation with impressions from those three experiments. The questions did not remain separate for…
Bruce began with a poem and several AI systems. I began with almost no knowledge of Philip Larkin. What followed was not a lesson delivered by a machine, but a journey into curiosity, memory and the things people still need from one another. Bruce triggered the whole thing. He had taken Philip Larkin’s poem This…
Bruce and the Mayor on Maslow, artificial intelligence, bias, and the intellectual work that no machine can remove. This began as a conversation about Maslow and artificial intelligence. It became a conversation about abundance. For most of human history, knowledge was difficult to reach. You needed the right books, the right teacher, the right institution…
