Welcome to Virtual Work. Who blogs here?

They say that "writing is thinking". I thought I wanted to become a better writer. Turns out, I needed to get better at thinking.

Someone once defined blogging as "publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesising them in longer pieces...".

Whether what seems significant to me seems important to anyone else is a moot point. I'm happy with that.

Virtual Work was born one sunny afternoon on the top deck of a bus heading back into central Edinburgh from the Napier University campus at Merchiston. It was my digital love child with @OperaNomad, my co-conspirator-in-chief and partner in many victimless crimes over the years.

Having somehow managed to complete the university’s post-grad qualification in information systems and design, Catriona and I were on the verge of forming our own Web agency.

We were having fun playing in the emerging world of the internet; to the extent that it was hard to believe we had actually created proper jobs for ourselves. Trying to do something good in the virtual world was a breeze compared to other jobs we'd had. 

That afternoon on the bus, one of us said:

“This feels virtually like working.”

And the other one said:

"Virtual Work - that's our new company name"

And so we launched Virtual Work (1.0) as one of the UK’s first digital agencies, in the autumn of 1995.

We focussed on delivering projects and training on behalf of various Scottish Third Sector organisations and the City of Edinburgh Council. We also had a commercial interest in developing software in support of intellectual property protection on the internet. 

The .com boom was well underway and fortunes were being made. We rented a small office space in an Edinburgh city centre mews; we bought ourselves some shiny PCs; we put up a toy basketball hoop and an enormous whiteboard, and we worked our socks off, waiting for what we referred to as “our gravy boat” to arrive.

By the end of 1996 it was all over. Catriona returned to academia to complete her PhD, and I took myself back to London and the heady world of online publishing for Thomson, the business-to-business publisher.

Roll forward a lot of years and here I am, recently withdrawn from the back rooms and battle grounds of public service broadcasting, once again playing around in the online, digital world. I’m still having fun, so Virtual Work (2.0) was the obvious choice of name for this project.

The Open Data Institute defines data ethics as:

‘A branch of ethics that evaluates data practices with the potential to adversely impact on people and society – in data collection, sharing and use’

And they go on to say:

"Data ethics relates to good practice around how data is collected, used and shared. It is especially relevant when data activities have the potential to impact people and society, directly or indirectly."

What interests me are data management practices that give rise to unintended negative consequences, with the potential to cause to actual harm to real people.

One text book example of unintended negative consequences arising from an ethically-suspect data practice is the sad case of the racist soap dispenser.

 As an example of poor data practice from an ethical point of view it speaks to a real need for product development teams to take a much more diverse and inclusive approach to their work.

Racial bias as just one form of tech bias is discussed in more detail in this 2019 article: BIGOTRY ENCODED: RACIAL BIAS IN TECHNOLOGY

When I started planning this blog, the subject of AI was only of peripheral interest to me. However, the recent surge in popular interest in AI means that fresh headlines are never far away. There’s a lot going on, and a lot of ethical issues arising.

I’m not a data scientist and I don’t know a lot about machine learning, or the large language models (LLMs) which underpin current developments e.g. ChatGPT.

I understand that what today we consider as “artificial intelligence” is:
“based on the assumption that the process of human thought can be mechanized.” (From Wikipedia: History of artificial intelligence ).

It’s this assumption that interests me; the drive to make tools which promise to augment and even enhance human performance, particularly where this is of benefit to ourselves and/or of service to others.

As impressive (and as problematic) as current AI models may be, it's essential to avoid the trap of ascribing "god-like" powers to these constructed entities. As a clever friend of mine once said: “machine learning is just another tool in the statistician’s toolbox.”

I believe that we benefit most from technology when its development and use is demystified. Any technology is morally neutral. It's what it gets used for that can really warrant scrutiny.

Note that I have used AI to help produce some of the content on this site - I make it clear where this has happened.

My interest in cave art was inspired by both an early memory and some recent research on the origins of written language. Here's a short piece I wrote on the possible connections between art and data.

The images of robots were not my idea; they seem to have invited themselves. I asked the DALL-E image generator to show me some black and white line drawings of an AI entity doing various types of "virtual work". And back came drawings of robots. Lots of robots. 

We can discuss the possible reasons why in the comments. 

contact@virtualwork.ai