Antonym: The Neuro-spicy Edition
How apps for neurodivergent people are wonderful for everyone, highlights from the AI for teams webinar and TV/book recommends.
Dear Reader
The last two weeks have been a progressive jazz piece of emotions and events. Atonal, clashing, sometimes wonderful, sometimes confusing. Let’s get into some of it…
AI for spicy minds
We all come to generative AI with frames that make us see its potential differently. A management consultant sees a tool for accelerating business productivity, a designer sees an ideation and creative accelerator, and writers see an ever-present editor to help do some of the cognitive heavy-lifting of composing, sharing and polishing prose.
To break the frame or shake loose from it for a while, borrow other people’s or just see what they are seeing.
A perfect example is Goblin Tools, an app designed for the neuro-spicy mind.
Quick aside: what does “neuro-spicy” mean? Neuro-spicy is a delightful replacement for the term “neurodivergent”, meaning non-typical minds. (The idea of a typical mind is tricky anyway, but we’ll return to that later.) Neurodivergent would describe people living with autism, attention deficit disorder, and – depending on who you ask – anyone with dyslexia, dyspraxia or dyscalculia (difficulty with numbers).
The app is a Swiss-army knife of apps to help people whose minds work slightly differently from most. It offers “Judge”, which tells you whether you may be misreading the tone of an email, “Estimator”, which tries to estimate how long a task should take and “Compiler”, which creates a list of tasks from a brain dump of -everything you need to get done.
Most wonderful of all, though, is its “Magic To-Do List”. You put in a job you need to get done and set a “spicy level” – a slider from one to five chillis – and then click a little magic wand icon. The app then breaks down the job into things to do. Here’s an example, this video shows “Tidy my office” broken down into a task list, then the user chooses to break down one of those tasks into more steps.
While this is designed for the neuro-spicy, I think it is useful for anyone when they start getting tired or are procrastinating on a task. It could even be used to jump-start a bit of project management planning.
Goblin Tools is available as an app (about 99p on the iOS store and for Android) and free to use on the website website. What a bargain.
No, you can’t accurately detect what was written by ChatGPT
Teachers sometimes penalise students whose writing has been flagged by “AI Detection”. This technology doesn’t work and should be avoided because it gets things wrong too often and disproportionately “marks down” the work of people whose second language is English.
Dramatic illustrations of AI-detection’s flaws can be seen in its analysis of parts of the Bible and the US Constitution which were seen as b very likely to have been AI-generated.
There is no magic formula that can reliably distinguish between human-written text and text composed by a machine. Experts claim that AI writing detectors are mostly ineffective and not always accurate, with a high rate of false positives. These detectors may unfairly harm non-native English speakers, making the detection of AI-generated text extremely unreliable.
For more, read “Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI”.
Co-working spaces forever!
We’ve moved into new offices for a new chapter of Brilliant Noise, and they are wonderful. It’s in the latest location by the Runway East group, not far from the North Laine and Brighton station.
It’s the second co-working space we’ve called home. The wonderful Plus X was our base for the last three years, and frankly, I’ll miss it a great deal. With so many high-quality co-working spaces with decent private offices, I can’t imagine returning to a traditional long lease on a big office again.
This week I’m…
Watching…
✈️ Hijack (Apple TV)
The recommendation of Idris On A Plane – a.k.a. Hijacked – in the last Antonym has held up well. The only complaint I’ve heard about it from anyone everyone is that the one-episode-per-week release schedule by Apple TV is TORTURE. Please, Apple, just let your people binge…
💆🏽♀️ The Horror of Delores Roach (Amazon Prime)
This has some strange provenance in podcasts / not-true-crime or something but it is intriguing. A woman in New York goes to prison for 19 years and emerges to find herself bereft of friends or even familiar landmarks, except for an empanada emporium where she holes up and starts a massage business/murder spree. I don’t know where this is going, but the performances and writing are enough to keep me hooked.
Reading
🤯A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins
As opening paragraphs go, this one is spectacular:
The cells in your head are reading these words. Think of how remarkable that is. Cells are simple. A single cell can't read, or think, or do much of anything. Yet, if we put enough cells together to make a brain, they not only read books, they write them. They design buildings, invent technologies, and decipher the mysteries of the universe. How a brain made of simple cells creates intelligence is a profoundly interesting question, and it remains a mystery.
Even before you get to that that fine first sentence – “The cells in your head are reading these words.” – there’s a foreword by Richard Dawkins that is a cognitive adventure in itself.
The book is the outcome of Hawkins’s quest to understand how we could know so much about the brain and its physical properties but still not understand how this thing we call our mind can emerge from it. His big idea is:
the brain's model of the world is built using maplike reference frames. Not one reference frame, but hundreds of thousands of them. Indeed, we now understand that most of the cells in your neocortex are dedicated to creating and manipulating reference frames, which the brain uses to plan and think.
I’m enthralled.
🦋Moths, by Jane Hennigan
One of the FT’s summer books picks in the science fiction section, Moths is about a world where a lepidopteran pandemic turns men into violent maniacs. Twenty years later, the remaining uninfected men are confined to air-tight facilities that are more or less prisons. Pitched as a reverse-The Handmaid’s Tale, it is fine, high-concept dystopian fun in the mode of Naomi Alderman’s The Power.
That’s all for this week.
Thank you for reading – I hope you found something you liked.
Antony