Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
That’s Slieve Donard, the third highest peak on this island, snow capped as it was this morning.
[Read more…] about Authority or Opinion‘The world is too small for the kind of localism that leads to wars. We can have special pride in our country, our language, and our literature, our customs and culture and tradition, but it has to be the abstract pride we have in our baseball team or our college – a pride that cannot and must not be backed by force of arms.’
I read a ton of science fiction as a teenager and continued well into my twenties. My father seemed to be reading almost nothing else, though he also introduced me to Neville Shute and lots of WWII memoirs. SF was fully normalised in our home and I took years to understand how rare it was for households to be looking into possible futures. I am so grateful, with hindsight, that ‘what if’ was the mantra rather than ‘once upon a time’.
A 2017 Dalkey Book Festival talk I attended has lingered in memory. It was ostensibly about America, Russia and the new Cold War. It awoke something else in me. I was, at that time, professionally engaged in seeking geosicence applications for algorithms and machines that could learn. What I sought was time. I saw (and see) algos and ML as labour saving devices like the clothes- and dish- washers that continue to liberate people from drudgery. Freedom from repetitive, mind numbing tasks, creates the opportunity to pursue more rewarding things. And I sought to help my colleagues find unseen correlations, derive new insights and put their time to more creative uses. There wasn’t an easy answer to be had.
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