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Oxford University Press is excited to be welcoming Professor Steve Furber as the new Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal. In an interview between Justin Richards of BCS, The Chartered Institute of IT and Steve, we get to know more about the SpiNNaker project, ethical issues around Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the future of the IT industry.

The post Conversations in computing: Q&A with Editor-in-Chief, Professor Steve Furber appeared first on OUPblog.

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By Luciano Floridi

When we use a computer, its performance seems to degrade progressively. This is not a mere impression. An old version of Firefox, the free Web browser, was infamous for its “memory leaks”: it would consume increasing amounts of memory to the detriment of other programs. Bugs in the software actually do slow down the system. We all know what the solution is: reboot. We restart the computer, the memory is reset, and the performance is restored, until the bugs slow it down again.

Philosophy is a bit like a computer with a memory leak. It starts well, dealing with significant and serious issues that matter to anyone. Yet, in time, its very success slows it down. Philosophy begins to care more about philosophers’ questions than philosophical ones, consuming increasing amount of intellectual attention. Scholasticism is the ultimate freezing of the system, the equivalent of Windows’ “blue screen of death”; so many resources are devoted to internal issues that no external input can be processed anymore, and the system stops. The world may be undergoing a revolution, but the philosophical discourse remains detached and utterly oblivious. Time to reboot the system.

Philosophical “rebooting” moments are rare. They are usually prompted by major transformations in the surrounding reality. Since the nineties, I have been arguing that we are witnessing one of those moments. It now seems obvious, even to the most conservative person, that we are experiencing a turning point in our history. The information revolution is profoundly changing every aspect of our lives, quickly and relentlessly. The list is known but worth recalling: education and entertainment, communication and commerce, love and hate, politics and conflicts, culture and health, … feel free to add your preferred topics; they are all transformed by technologies that have the recording and processing of information as their core functions. Meanwhile, philosophy is degrading into self-referential discussions on irrelevancies.

The result of a philosophical rebooting today can only be beneficial. Digital technologies are not just tools merely modifying how we deal with the world, like the wheel or the engine. They are above all formatting systems, which increasingly affect how we understand the world, how we relate to it, how we see ourselves, and how we interact with each other.

The ‘Fourth Revolution’ betrays what I believe to be one of the topics that deserves our full intellectual attention today. The idea is quite simple. Three scientific revolutions have had great impact on how we see ourselves. In changing our understanding of the external world they also modified our self-understanding. After the Copernican revolution, the heliocentric cosmology displaced the Earth and hence humanity from the centre of the universe. The Darwinian revolution showed that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through natural selection, thus displacing humanity from the centre of the biological kingdom. And following Freud, we acknowledge nowadays that the mind is also unconscious. So we are not immobile, at the centre of the universe, we are not unnaturally separate and diverse from the rest of the animal kingdom, and we are very far from being minds entirely transparent to ourselves. One may easily question the value of this classic picture. After all, Freud was the first to interpret these three revolutions as part of a single process of reassessment of human nature and his perspective was blatantly self-serving. But replace Freud with cognitive science or neuroscience, and we can still find the framework useful to explain our strong impression that something very significant and profound has recently happened to our self-understanding.

Since the fifties, computer science and digital technologies have been changing our conception of who we are. In many respects, we are discovering that we are not standalone entities, but rather interconnected informational agents, sharing with other biological agents and engineered artefacts a global environment ultimately made of information, the infosphere. If we need a champion for the fourth revolution this should definitely be Alan Turing.

The fourth revolution offers a historical opportunity to rethink our exceptionalism in at least two ways. Our intelligent behaviour is confronted by the smart behaviour of engineered artefacts, which can be adaptively more successful in the infosphere. Our free behaviour is confronted by the predictability and manipulability of our choices, and by the development of artificial autonomy. Digital technologies sometimes seem to know more about our wishes than we do. We need philosophy to make sense of the radical changes brought about by the information revolution. And we need it to be at its best, for the difficulties we are facing are challenging. Clearly, we need to reboot philosophy now.

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He was recently appointed as ethics advisor to Google. His most recent book is The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality.

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Image credit: Alan Turing Statue at Bletchley Park. By Ian Petticrew. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Rebooting Philosophy appeared first on OUPblog.

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It's  been a while since I've done one of these posts. Not that I haven't thought about what it means to be a writer every second of every minute of every day. It's an occupational hazard. However, this most recent revelation is just too defining to writerdom not to share.

You might be a writer if...you still carry a security blanket.

Don't get me wrong. We're not that obvious about it. We're writers. We've given them much better names, such as Mac, Notebook Pro, Laptop, or the classic, best disguise, Computer.

As if, you sneer. It's my computer. That's all.


I see. Let's run a little checklist, shall we?

1) Is "your computer" one of the last things you look at before you go to bed? And one of the first when you get up?
2) Do you lovingly clean its parts?
3) Do you start to feel nervous when you haven't spent time with "your computer"?
4) So do you take it with you everywhere you go?
5) Take it out of the car when it's cold or hot, just like a child?
6) Is it your ONE carry on, regardless?
7) Does your heart skip a beat when, say, your husband/child/insert name of person who clearly does not get how IMPORTANT this "computer" is accidentally unplugs your "computer" and the battery runs down and it won't fire up right away?
8) Do you plot revenge? 
9) When there's a tornado, earthquake (we've had our share here in Oklahoma this fine fall) or other possible natural disaster, do you have an exit strategy that includes all essentials, such as your children, your husband, the pets, and your "computer"?
10) Most importantly, does it feel like an organic extension of you?

If you've answered yes to three or more of these questions, you may want to sit down. I have news. Your computer isn't just a computer. It's a security blanket.

That's not a bag thing. I mean, our livelihoods depend on these computers, don't they? We find creative expression - and, if we're really lucky, a paycheck - through its magical electrical circuits (Is that a good story idea?) It's no wonder we carry them with us wherever we go.

What was telling for me is that I didn't always feel this way about my computer. The joined-at-the-hip feeling started somewhere in the middle of my dissertation, i.e. my first official written creation. When I was six months pregnant with my first child (actual, human child), I was knee deep in the dissertation. I had six of eight chapters almost complete. I got up, went through my usual morning routine, then sat down at my computer. I opened the dissertation file, which I had backed up on two different external drives, and in individual chapters just to make sure I didn't lose anything. Stories of other grads who'd lost whole dissertations due to lazy back up methods were more than urban myths in grad schools. They were nightmares.

One that became real for me. None of the files would open.

Panic. Major, major panic. The kind that was so intense my daughter didn't move for six hours.

To make a long, painful story somewhat less painful for those of you who can imagine what it's like to lose 40,000 well-crafted words, complete with illustrations, I ended up at the computer lab at UVA. Many techs later, I was at the IT guru's desk, the last resort, the nuclear option of technical difficulties. He tried everything. Nothing worked. Then he made a call. A friend of a friend had an experimental version of the latest Word program. There were no promises but...

In that moment, I understood Faust only too well.
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By Anatoly Liberman

LOL and the wide world. Many thanks for the interesting comments, questions, and antedatings! Here comes the first spring set of gleanings. In a story, supposed to be funny, a boy who did not speak until he was six years old suddenly said at dinner: “Too much salt in the soup.” The family was overjoyed, and everybody asked: “Why have you not spoken before?” “So far, I had nothing to complain about,” was the answer. My mail is not too heavy, apparently because I seldom irritate our readers. But last month I applied the epithet short-lived to LOL, the king/queen of texting, and immediately three comments assured me that LOL is very much alive. I stand corrected and hasten to express my joy about the longevity of such a serviceable “word,” the more so as I have studied the history of laughter, and every expression of it, especially when it is unconcealed and loud, warms the cockles of my heart.

Generic they, a permanent irritant. This is an old hat. At one time, I launched a quixotic attack on sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait and if a tenant is evicted, it does not mean they were a bad tenant. I contended that such sentences owe their existence to a misguided attempt to get rid of generic he and that the remedy was worse than the disease. Let it be repeated that I did not defend him or her and in general did not say anything outrageous, but my taunt brought forth numerous responses. Some people said that constructions of this type had been used since the days of King Alfred, Chaucer, Fielding, Thackeray, and many other illustrious authors who lived before the-mid seventies of the 20th century (the chronological span is a bit disconcerting). Almost nothing of any interest has been found, and certainly no monstrosities like those I quoted in my post turned up in any old book, for the antecedent has invariably been someone, no one, a person, and so forth. However, every now and then I receive letters purporting to prove me wrong. Here is an example dated 1909: “I don’t want to be a lady… they can’t ever ride straddle nor climb a tree, and they got to squinch their waists and toes.” (Frances Boyd Calhoun, Miss Minerva and William Green Hill; I have no page reference). This is a far cry from the expectant student and the hapless tenant mentioned above. There was no way to avoid they here except for repeating the noun (I don’t want to be a lady. Ladies…). I can say something like it about anything. “No, not a marker. They leave traces on my hands” or “Is this only a mouse? I am not afraid of them.” But they were not a bad tenant? Give me a break!

More about pronouns: “You are It.” I received a question about the origin of it in children’s games. Much to my disappointment, not a single citation has been found in my database (which now exists as A Bibliography of English Etymology). This means that in over 20,000 articles and notes I have read while compiling this bibliography, no one mentioned the history of it even in a perfunctory way. The editors of the OED seem to have run into a similar problem. In the original edition, it (in games) is not mentioned at all. In the First Supplement a few examples appeared, none of them antedating 1888. Later an 1842 example was dug up. The most amazing thing is how late those examples are. Should we assume that it in the games of tag and blindman’s buff did not exist before roughly the middle of the 19th century? This would be a startling assum

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by Brent Crawford Hyperion 2009 It depends on what the meaning of the words 'it' is. Tomorrow, part two: A more in-depth look.

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With the recent news of Yahoo’s potential acquisition by vile Microsoft and its prior layoff of 1000 hardworking geeks, there was a bit of an air of piracy in the office last week.

Linden Lab is going into another round of recruitment, focusing on web developers, QA folk, and other nerdy types. If any web developers out there (you, yes, YOU Joy!) want to work in a more stable, hilarious, and weird environment, you might want to fill out an application to work at Second Life. Free beer, the Love Machine, and a frightening amount of RockBand can all be yours!

Linden seems to be where the socially-developed nerds go to work. There’s a much larger % of women, extroverts, parents, and charmers working at Linden than is considered industry standard. Which means you tend to not find yourself in conversations with dudes who can’t make eye contact with a girl, or folks who get REALLY EMOTIONAL about their code.

It’s good to be a god, too, even if it’s only in-world. You can read more about our wickedcool office culture in the Tao of Linden.

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I just listened to Harry Potter 6 on my iPod--all 17 discs worth of it. It was a long haul, but the audio recordings are very very good.

I have some predictions about the upcoming seventh book and I want to document them here. First, I'd like to say that I do not read fan sites and I have not gotten sucked into debates about Harry Potter anywhere else. Being a fiction writer myself, I recognize that getting embroiled in an argument about what is going to happen in an upcoming piece of fiction is perhaps more ridiculous than fighting over what the weather is going to be like next month.

That being said, here are my predictions:

Snape: I believe that Snape is not as evil as we've been led to believe. I think he dispensed with Dumbledore for a specific reason, but I believe Dumbledore was right in trusting Snape. Dumbledore was too smart and Snape was too obviously evil for me to believe that Dumbledore just made an error in character judgment, which led to his demise. Dumbledore had a reason to trust Snape and I'm siding with Dumbledore on this one. That being said, I believe Dumbledore may play a role in book 7, but I believe he will remain dead. After all, he had quite a kick-ass funeral!

The DA: Dumbledore's Army (the D.A.) is the future. I think book 7 will reveal that Voldemort's operatives have compromised the Ministry of Magic more than we ever realized--all the way up to the top. I think that book 7 will see a huge upheaval that will lead to the toppling of the magical government. The aurors will be killed or rendered powerless and the DA will rise to the occasion and clean house.

Horcruxes: I'm not sure whether this has been postulated, but I think Harry himself is a horcrux. For those of you not into Harry Potter and just reading this to humor me, a horcrux (according to book 6) is when a powerful wizard splits their soul and implants it into an inanimate object in order to make the wizard more difficult to destroy. It is believed that Voldemort split his soul into 7 parts. All the way back to the first time we saw the Sorting Hat and it said Harry should be in Slytherin, I knew Harry had some part of him that was evil. I believe that Voldemort was trying to kill Harry to impart his soul fragment into an inanimate object and something went wrong that resulted in Voldemort's soul fragment to be implanted in Harry.

The Prophesy: The prophesy states, "either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives." This prophesy is worded very strangely and very carefully, is it not? I think this goes back to the issue of the horcrux. With part of Voldemort's soul within Harry, neither can live while the other survives. In other words, Harry can never be free with part of Voldemort inside of him and Voldemort can never live while Harry is still alive, since Voldemort would need that fragment back if he is to truly live.

Does Harry Die: When it's all finished, I believe Harry is going to live. If you've read my entire post, you'll know that the DA will need a leader and Harry has been aiming to be an auror for the past few years. People are talking all over the place about whether Harry is going to die in this book 7. Perhaps I am an eternal optimist, but I think Harry is going to live. He serves a direct function and he needs to go on to see to the rebirth of the magic world. Despite the prophesy, its strange wording leads me to believe JK Rowling has a loophole up the sleeve of her magical robes.

And that's all I'm going to say about Harry Potter. It's only 2 months away until the book's release and we'll see if I'm right! So, why in the title of this blog entry do I say that I hope I'm wrong, you ask? That's easy.

I want to be surprised!

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