I’m deep into National Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) and it’s wrecking my ability to write here. I’m in the middle of writing my second book and so far, I’m 14,000 words in for the month of November. For context, I wrote 9,000 words in all of October. The goal of #NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words. I’m a little behind but I’m still shooting for it.
It’s also International Education Week (IEW2018) so I’m busy promoting GlobalMe School and teaching career services how to improve international student career outcomes on one of my other websites. In short, I’m tapped out of words.
On the plus side, #NaNoWriMo month is an excellent tool for aspiring book writers. Things I’ve learned in only two weeks:
- The only way you will write a book is to put your ass in a seat and write. Truth.
- Writing without self-editing is the hardest part of this month long exercise. I’ll never make it to 50K words if I edit.
- Researching writing is not writing your book. Neither is writing about writing a book (which I’m doing now). Writing your book is the only writing that counts towards the goal of publishing a book.
- Getting comfortable with the rawness of your words and accepting the messiness is part of the process.
- The world is full of people who say they can write better than (insert book here). Like most things, it’s so much harder than it looks.
So in lieu of a post, here’s an article dump on the most interesting things I’ve read this week about AI and ethics, a subject I’m increasingly more interested in. If I weren’t so brain dead from barfing words elsewhere, I’m sure I’d come up with something clever to say about these. But I can’t. So here we are.
Principles for Ethical Machine Learning
China takes facial recognition tech to Africa
This insanely creepy roundup of patents to increase corporate surveillance in your home and I can’t even…
Keeping an eye on tech patents is a very useful way of spotting important trends. This in today’s Observer – about digital assistants – is useful. pic.twitter.com/6yrYQU8KEM
— Jamie Bartlett (@JamieJBartlett) November 11, 2018
Followed by this tweet by the ever insightful researcher Zeynep Tufekci.
"(We're) sleepwalking into surveillance capitalism, which is evolving into data and computation driven authoritarianism, one cool service at a time." ~ @zeynep
— Jeff Gunther (@jeffgunther) November 13, 2018