Posts Tagged: Artificial intelligence

  • Cartoon image of a person drowning in AI slop (the Word of the Year 2025)

    Word of the Year 2025

    Every year the world’s major English dictionaries publish their word of the year for 2025 (WOTY25). It can be an interesting window into the political, social and cultural drivers of our world. Dictionaries from the “Anglosphere” give us insights into how our changing vocabulary reflects our changing lives. So unsurprisingly the collection of WOTYs from […]

  • A.I. generated and modified image of Karl Marx who coined the word lumpenproletariat behind an Apple MacBook with a word bubble "Resistance in futile".

    Lumpenproletariat in the A.I. Digitopia

    Very recently I wrote a post about the Luddites. In it, I light-heartedly drew a parallel with the arrival of artificial intelligence (A.I.) in modern times and suggested we either try to take the benefits of the opportunity or we get left behind. The machine breakers of earlier times could not stop technology changing their […]

  • Cartoon on the life of George Thomas Baker machine breaker or Luddite

    Luddites—the machine breakers

    I have just visited my dear old mother in my hometown of Scone NSW. While there, I visited the grave of George Robert Baker in the church cemetery. My mother, was an English history teacher at Scone High School in the 1970s and 1980s. She had also been active in the local historical society and […]

  • Image of the INCEL with the Caption WORD OF THE WEEK DOOMER

    Doomer—AI despair

    I got reminded of the delightfully lacerating word “doomer” this week (21 May 2025). It was used in an article describing people that are terrified of artificial intelligence (AI) and comparing them with those who are wildly optimistic about it—bloomers. “Doomer” is quite a few years old now and quite established in online parlance. The […]

  • John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Image from https://blog.allganize.ai/john-mccarthy/

    Artificial intelligence making the news

    Everyone is talking about the free-access Chat GPT released in early December last year (2022). It uses artificial intelligence to generate reasonably sophisticated copy. One journalist wrote an article for the ABC that suggested it was good enough to pass some medical exams. Another from the Sydney Morning Herald got the bot to write the article. The […]