La la la la la can’t hear you! (or, when personalisation really sucks) [post 9/100]

There’s a bit of synchronicity of ideas going on today. A friend and co-conspirator in Superhuman is working on an interaction model that’s heavily driven by personalisation. And this morning, I was linked (thanks, Tom!) to an article about where the Nest experience went terribly wrong for Kara Pernice, one of its (former) users. These two things share a critical …

Master and servant [post 6/100]

Who’s the boss in our relationships with our technology? Over the weekend I had lunch with a friend, who told me about a client meeting he’d had last week. The client was wearing some sort of connected watch, which kept beeping and flashing alerts at him throughout the meeting, which he kept glancing at and mostly dismissing, but which still …

Singularity, Schmingularity

There are those who insist that by 2045 we will have  achieved the Singularity: Artificial Intelligence will have surpassed our own. This may be the case, but then again it may not be. In the 1960s there were those who thought they could crack AI in one summer. What’s interesting about the AI debate is… well, a lot. But one …

The myth of productivity

Pretty much as long as there have been ways for people to interact online, there have been articles written about how that kind of thing is killing productivity. Email and MUD/ MUSHes were killing productivity when I was at University, then Email and the Web and IMing were killing it at work in the 90s. Lots of employers went to …

Me and my (data) shadow

I’ve been on a bit of a speaking tour the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been growing more vested in and impassioned by my current topic every time I talk about it. What I’ve been talking about is how we can become more human, better at being human, using all the richness of data and technology that we are …

Say what? (Musings on modern-day communication)

When I was growing up, there were only 3 modes of communication in common use: face to face, synchronous (phone), and asynchronous (snail mail). Email started to pick up around the time I started university, and over the next decade mostly replaced snail mail. Now, there’s a huge variety of ways to communicate, and each of us has our own private …