I will be speaking on four panels at Norwescon this year. Science fiction conferences like Norwescon are excellent places for academics to be in conversation with the general public about science + technology + society. Offer an academic a smart and engaged general audience that loves science and creativity? Honestly….it’s not to be missed! I’m going to post some of my key points in advance in this post, and then update the post with additional thoughts after the panels based on questions and discussion.

Friday, 4/18

What about AI? – 12:00pm – 1:00pm @ Evergreen 1 & 2
Key points I want to make:
* We seem to be hitting the turning point in the hype cycle around AI. Thank goodness.
* It’s important and useful to remind oneself how these technologies work. They’re making guesses, often great guesses, based on patterns they’ve seen before and rules they’ve been taught. It is absolutely distinguishable from magic.
* AI technology has produced some cool toys, and sometimes useful tools, I use this stuff all the time. But the negatives are starting to be very visible.
* Winter is coming! What we’ve seen historically is that an AI summer, like what we’ve seen across the last 2 years, is followed by an AI winter, and that there’s a contrary / alternating trend where an AI winter is accompanied by a UX summer (UX = ‘User Experience’). A UX summer would mean a rise in people doing work to make technologies more user friendly, more valuable, and less harmful (sounds good to me).
* There’s a very compelling moment when you drop a prompt into one of these tools. But you have to imagine hundreds of other folks dropping in similar prompts and getting back similar results — college application essays, cover letters, the ‘make me as an action figure’ meme. It all looks the same after a while.
* There’s a social model problem that comes from the fact that AI can do an okay-ish job at many things — it means it’s now quite inefficient and unrewarded to be an amateur. But being a beginner is the only way to become an expert. We now need to carve out space in society much more intentionally to be bad at things, to perform poorly, to be stuck. Our struggle muscles need to develop.
* Folks at the panel asked about the future for working as a creative professional: there are absolutely some market pressures here, work for various forms of freelance work are drying up, especially if you’re not already a big name. I do think there’s some space opening up around authenticity and building connections (perhaps even a craving for the real), as well as increased emphasis on process and the value of process (perhaps even a craving for the self-made)
* Folks at the panel asked about tech policy and law about AI usage (this is still emerging, and that means it’s up to us as a society what we want the rules to be)

Recommendations:
* The Cagle Report has a weekly, very technical rundown of what’s going on in AI.
* For a weekly dose of hype-deflating commentary, try Mystery AI Hype Science Theater 3000 (podcast, Twitch stream) from the Distributed AI Research group.
* I recommend classes from Coursera and EdX for learning about AI. There are many (many) tutorials out there, but many of them are more like product pitches. Coursera and EdX are more like real classes, and in fact often are real classes.

Professional Nerds and Geeks – 5:00pm – 6:00pm @ Cascade 7 & 8
Key points I want to make:
* Feel free to AMA on academic or IT life
* Fandom and fan communities are great places to build marketable skills. Creative and technical fields (ux, design, data science, IT), but also substantial skills around building sociality, organizing, project management.
* It’s ok to keep your worlds separate, or to let them collide. Your skills do not have to be marketable! Work-Life Balance can be your thing, or you can declare it pointless. Judge yourself less.
* You might encounter a lot of folks in this space who encourage you to dive in, start mucking around, and follow your curiosities. This approach to technology is of course totally valid, but it’s not the only way. It turns out, the dive-in-break-stuff perspective is driven by a very particular cognitive style, and not everyone engages that cognitive style — and if it’s not you, that’s ok, that doesn’t mean you can’t be a happy tech geek….it just means you might need to ignore the dive-in-break-stuiff crowd :). If this is your style….please remember it’s not the only valid way to be in the world, and telling people to be more like you might not serve your goals. There is a ton of cognitive psych research on this topic, particularly around the goals of making software more inclusive of different cognitive styles. There’s room to follow recipes and precise formulas, there’s room to improvise and intuit your way through, and there’s lots of space in between.
* LinkedIn is a thing!
* Lean in to your superpowers
* Research is awesome.

So you wannabe a Hacker – 7:00pm – 8:00pm @ Cascade 5 & 6

Key points I want to make:
* True stories that sound like fiction — XZ, infrastructure hacks like road signs, crosswalk buttons, power plants.
* Speculative launchpoints: who is vulnerable (as an individual, as a class), and what are their vulnerabilities? Does it have to be a hack, or can it just be a mistake that cascades? Centralized / locked down environments can prove quite difficult to fix?
* We will probably spend some time talking about the ‘hacker’ – ‘cracker’ distinction, i.e. hackers play with tech, not necessarily maliciously, while crackers are more interested in breaking in and maybe taking things. I feel like this is one of those eternal debates…as much as I’m on board with this panel, I also think the battle over this term is a bit stale. If you want to talk about an ethos of investigating how things work, let’s talk about that. If you want to talk about cybersecurity, let’s talk about that. If you want to talk about criminality, we can talk about that too.
* A lot of what goes on in the cybersecurity / criminality side of the hacker world is attack vectors via a mix of applied social psychology and algorithms: high volume attacks triggering socially vulnerable or naturally fear-inducing scenarios with a mix of randomness, automation, and even slave labor, driven by criminal gangs and state actors. A lot of it is not that cool.
* There’s very cool stuff that happens on the DIY / investigatory side of things. Seattle is home of the Seattle Community Network, many cool makerspace / hackerspaces like devhack and a community biohack lab (printable yeast, how cool is that).

Recommendations:
* The Register and Hacker News are good sources for current trends in cybersecurity
* You might also be very interested in privacy tools and learning how they work. Mozilla and the Tor Network are trustworthy in this space.
* Cory Doctorow does a ton of fun and critical fiction as well as tech activism around the hacker ethos; probably the most well-informed voice in this space.

Sunday, 4/20

When Mainframes Ruled the Earth – 1:00pm – 2:00pm @ Cascade 10

Key points I want to make:
* Maybe it goes without saying, but, yes, it really was that way! These macro-scale computers came to be quite widely distributed: hospitals, banks, universities. Machines the size of refrigerators, raised floor machine rooms, giant tapes, mainframe operators in uniforms.
* Much of the software we rely on today was written 30 years ago or more. We face substantial risks due to aging technical infrastructure.
* Lack of understanding of decisions made decades ago, and lack of regular maintenance and updating of digital infrastructure is complicating the process of upgrading to new technology.
* Technology embeds our assumptions: about society, about the future, about constraints and makes them durable (credit: French sociologist Bruno Latour).
* Speculating outward from what we see: what might we expect in a (fictional) society where no one knows how the things we rely on were built, and know one knows why they were built the way they were built?

Recommendations:
* Non-Fiction: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder really captures the spirit of what it means to build technology. This book has had a huge impact on my life, I think because of the way it brings workplace drama and the experience of being a technologist to life. I feel like too few authors work to evoke and explain professional life (if you’re not a doctor / lawyer / cop / starship captain, where’s your fiction? Non-fiction isn’t much better although there are some great ethnographies they’re often not oriented to a general public. There’s Barbara Ehrenreich, Studs Terkel, or humor like The IT Crowd, The Office, 3rd Rock, Parks & Rec). Not to go down a rabbit hole! But: this is a good book.
* Non-Fiction: The Modem World by Kevin Driscoll. This book is a social history and captures an early period of technology that has now faded away (although some aspects could return, if movements toward distributed social media platforms continue). Definitely useful for readers who did not live through the time of modems and BBSes.
* Fiction: The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. The audiobook versions are a treat. Stross definitely captures a very particular kind of techwork experience from a now-bygone era, and then carries the story forward to a near-present alternate timeline. The scope of topics is a bit overwhelming to list out but delightful as a reader….take workplace absurdity, massive bureaucracy, modern politics, snarky tech geeks, and assign then them to a very British / very secret service….then assign them to deal with vampires and zombies and Lovecraftian horrors and superpowers and manic pixie elves from alternate dimensions, and have the whole narrative actually work, and you’ll get this series. It’s a great ride.