Computer, call me a taxi.

February 2023

LLMs, education and the return of Expert Systems

February 2022

Back when you still needed to convince people to buy a computer, Steve Jobs loved to say Apple made “bicycles for the mind”, amplifying our output to…
As big tech buys up first media and now gaming, we might reasonably ask, is there any sector they won’t eventually consume? It can seem as if Google…
The metaverse is at once a “lazy rebranding of the same old social networks”, and yet also an “attempt to enslave humanity”. This is a familiar place…
I spoke to David Wighton at The Times about Gamification of Work, who quoted me as a “fan” of gamification: Yet the impact of the pandemic on the future…

January 2022

We are entering a new age of knowledge work: the Remote Era. In a McLuhan sense, the medium of office work has changed. Up until now, everybody thought…
Enterprise software design is converging on the patterns of game design because work is now fully virtual and game interfaces are the language of the…

May 2021

Many people are saying that the culture has entered a post-literate phase. “Post-literate” is supposed to mean that people no longer read books…

March 2021

Creative places are uncomfortable. The tendency is to relax into comfortableness, but this needs to be fought against. We should seek out irritation in…
I find reaching for my phone, opening Twitter and scrolling to be a hugely compelling activity. The thrill is something like a soap opera, reading…

January 2020

When Americans reach for a European city to illustrate their point I notice they almost never pick London. If, “What about European tech?”, is the…