I’m collecting thought-seeds for possible future work related to the user experience of products containing artificial intelligence. Here is some thinking-aloud after a little ad-hoc digging triggered by reading about The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), who got some attention in mainstream media this week, especially for the part of their research area concerning artificial general super-intelligence.

So. First: moral and ethics [ Read more ]

Sometimes I get to lecture a crowd or two about the near future of smart networked products and services. This is an image I have used to describe where product design is heading. It is originally borrowed from robot research, showing what they call the “uncanny valley“; the steep drop just before the curve reaches the upper right corner of the chart. It shows how [ Read more ]

So, we all know what a robot is, don’t we? C3PO and R2D2 are robots. So is the Terminator and so are the cute robots from “Robots”. At least these are the most common robots mentioned by the people I met during 6 months of fieldwork during 2009 and 2010 where I asked robotics specialists, those [ Read more ]