John Naughton

2 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | John Naughton

Bill Atkinson, one of the great software wizards of our time, has died at the age of 74. That probably won’t mean anything to most people, but it’s worth noting because he changed the way we all interact with computers. I still remember the moment when I first encountered his work – a moment that James Joyce might have described as an epiphany. It was at a workshop for academics in Cambridge organised by Apple UK in 1984 to introduce its new Macintosh computer.

3 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | John Naughton

Students are already using tools such as ChatGPT. Academic institutions should embrace them too Remember when ChatGPT first broke cover in late 2022 – the excitement, astonishment, puzzlement at what a mere machine could suddenly do? And then the attendant feelings of dread, anger, anxiety and denialism that struck teachers and academic administrations everywhere. This, they fumed, was a tool custom-built to enable cheating on a global scale.

4 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | John Naughton

One of the most pernicious misconceptions we have about digital technology is that it is – somehow – weightless, frictionless and dematerialised. You press a button on your phone, launch an app and there it is. What you don’t realise is that you just triggered an interaction with an unfathomable infrastructure of network towers, fibreoptic cables and huge aluminium sheds located somewhere else on the planet. The technology may seem magical but, in reality, it has a heavy material footprint.

1 month ago | observer.co.uk | John Naughton

The commercial interests of US tech giants has fused with the country’s national interests. We’re about to find out what ‘digital sovereignty’ really means Here’s an interesting timeline.

1 month ago | observer.co.uk | John Naughton

Elon Musk has gone full blitzkrieg in his mission to ‘eliminate’ waste in the US federal government Reid Hoffman was recently in Cambridge, where I work. Who he? He’s one of the “PayPal mafia”, a group of former employees or founders of the online payments system who used their share of the proceeds when eBay paid $1.5bn for the business in 2002 to found other tech companies. These included LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, YouTube and Yammer.