In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: "What are the contents of the'vague tech canon'? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?" He was using the term "canon" in the sense of "the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre", but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave. Greer's challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value 65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn't "the list of books that I think one ought to read – it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here".

While most job interviews were once face-to-face affairs, during the Covid-19 pandemic there was a surge in the number of interviews taking place online. Amid this rise, many companies started using AI tools to sift through candidates before they were interviewed by a human. These tools are marketed as unbiased against gender and ethnicity, with developers claiming they can help to improve diversity in the workplace. However, a new study has warned that using AI in hiring is little better than'automated pseudoscience'. Researchers from the University of Cambridge found that.

We're moving at the Cagle house and we're discovering that, after eight years of living at the same place, one family can collect a lot of crap. The issue came up, in discussions with my spouse, that my mother-in-law had no sense of organization -- which seemed odd because my wife's mother was the kind of person to organize wrapping paper for holidays by season and family. On the other hand, my wife, a writer, has a particular scheme for organizing the dishes in the dishwasher and for finding her books on educational theory in the house's myriad bookshelves, but has a largish pile of boxes specifically labeled "Christmas Stuff." My daughter, an artist, has bookshelves full of manga categorized by Japanese publishers, titles, and issues, has drawers designated for drawing pads, pens, buttons that she produces, and similar content. Yet her clothes are mostly scattered in her room, and games are stacked helter-skelter. If three genetically related people could have such wildly divergent ways of organizing informational content, why is it surprising that organizations with thousands of people in them have so much difficulty organizing their relevant information space?

I read an article the other day about a computer program that writes fiction. You feed it a few lines, tell it the genre – science fiction, horror – and it produces the rest. It writes in full grammatical sentences; comes up with metaphors and analogies; emulates a writer's particular style and so on. The author of the article, who seemed a little too thrilled about the existence of this diabolical toy from the depths of Silicon Valley says, at some point, that this "tool" was going to be the "salvation" for writers who dislike writing, which, according to him, is nearly all writers. I want to say to this writer: you are wrong. And to this robot that writes fiction I want to say … well I don't want to say anything to it because, you know, robots are robots.