... in public spaces

Towards a Shared Digital Europe











On selling AI fever dreams to gullible publics

The Guardian recently had an op-ed by John Naughton on how the media is guilty in selling us AI fantasies at the behest of the technology industry. This scratches my long held belief that (a) AI is both poorly understood and as a result (b) completely oversold (at least when it comes to non-trivial problems of optimising consumption patterns1. In his op-ed Naughton primarily looks at how industry serving narratives about AI have come to dominate media coverage of AI, which he mainly attributes at journalists doing a fairly shoddy job:




In essence this observation is neither new or specific to media coverage of AI. Similar dynamics can be observed across the whole gamut of technology journalism where the media is breathlessly amplifying thinly veiled sales pitches of technology companies. A couple of years ago, Adam Greenfield did an excellent job at dissecting these dynamics for the “smart cities” narrative. Adam’s post went one step further by focussing on how these media narratives find their way into public policies via bureaucrats who are ill-equipped to critically question them.

Even if we assume that the current capacities and impacts of AI systems are massively oversold, it is still clear that widespread deployment of Artificial Intelligence has the potential to further wreck the social fabric of our societies in pursuit of optimising the extraction of value. Given this it is not entirely surprising that the purveyors of the AI driven future are anticipating on the inevitable backlash:


The term “ethics theatre” seems spot on in this context. So far the whole discussion about AI ethics does indeed resemble a theatre more than anything else2. On multiple occasions I have seen otherwise critical people become almost deferential to some imagined higher order of discourse as soon as discussions were framed as being about the “ethics of…”. Having unmasked the abundance of ethics talk as an attempt to proactively deflect regulation Naughton points out that what we really need is indeed regulation:


This is an idea that we should take very seriously. Now that our public spaces are more and more defined by code and data, it is high time to realise that ideas like “moving fast and breaking things” are the equivalent ignoring building codes when constructing schools in earthquake-prone areas.

  1. That being said, I would totally be in the market for an AI powered app that can reliably tell me if an avocado is indeed ripe to eat. i would imagine that it can’t be that hard to train a neural network to do so by feeding it thousands of avocado images labeled according to ripeness. ↩︎

  2. The notable exception is the 2017 MIT experiment about the who should be killed by autonomous vehicles, which probably kick-started this entire AI ethics trope. Although in retrospect that was not so much about AI ethics but about the personal ethics of the participants. In my case the strongly held belief that any “self driving” car must always attempt to minimise harm done to anyone not driving in a car, even if that comes at the cost of maximising deaths among vehicle passengers. ↩︎

Lille 3000






Comes with built in bench! (tres chique!)

Milk in Afrika (revisited)

06 Aug 2006 | 114 words | amsterdam art public spaces milk

Looks like as if that giant milk bottle sculpture on my way to work did not really refer to africa at all. the whole thing got cleaned recently and that cleaning operation did not only remove the ‘milk free youth’ graffiti but also the ‘in africa’ typography, which i had assumed to have been part of the original sculpture.

This of course makes the original act of putting a giant milk-bottle sculpture on a playground even more lame! no references to far away continents anymore, just a plain disgusting milk bottle! how utterly disappointing:

On the bright side however, lame milk bottle sculptures do constitute fairly decent surfaces for posters to be glued on.

Dutch über alles!

Got reminded again that the Netherlands have turned into a society of discussing racist cowards less then 10 hours after arriving back back in amsterdam. on the front-page of todays Volkskrant there is an article titled ‘Verdonk: op straat alleen Nederlands‘ (link requires paid registration). In English this translates into ‘Verdonk: Dutch must be spoken in the streets’. Apparently the minster for ‘integration’ has completely lost her mind (not that this is any news). The local website for english speaking non-dutch speakers has the following summary the speech given by the minister last weekend:

Immigration and Integration Minister Rita Verdonk favors the introduction of a code of conduct for the public to emphasize Dutch identity, including speaking Dutch in the street

I really do not know what to say about this. What about the fact that the Netherlands have been in the front line for criticizing the turks for not allowing the kurds to speak kurdish in public for a long time? They even made this a requirement for Turkey in order to start membership talks with the EU. does that mean that the Netherlands should be kicked out of the EU?

And why would any sane individual want to have more Dutch spoken in the street anyway? It is one of the most ugly sounding languages in the whole universe (if in doubt try travelling in the bord-bistro of a sunday evening berlin amsterdam intercity train). I would rather listen to anything expressed in Arabic or Tamazight (the two languages that Verdonk really wants to ban with her stupid proposal).

Berlin, Alexanderplatz

09 Oct 2005 | 176 words | berlin cuba public spaces

Cycling past Alexanderplatz i noticed a group of people standing around a table in an otherwise deserted area on the northeastern side of the place. I stopped to take a closer look and it looked like they were playing some kind of game wile drinking and generally enjoying themselves on this unlikly location. When i approached them they told me that they where cubans and that they came to this very spot every day (as long as ‘the weather did not torture them’ as one of them expressed it to play domino, drink and be with friends. Asked why they had chosen this particular place they told me that this was because of the noise (it is right next to a mayor road) which would remind them of Cuba. Now i have always imagined cuba a bit different but if they say so i am fine with it. The whole thing somehow reminded me of my old mah jong set. guess i have to find someone to play with again…

domino players on alexanderplatz in berlin



Other things that i have made online: