Help Design the Society for Hopeful Technologists
Fill out a short survey to inform the design of the Society of Helpful Technologists
A quick update, or: one survey and two events
It’s been nearly 2 months since I sent a newsletter suggesting progressive technologists in the UK might need a union. Since then, I’ve had hundreds of emails about it and loads of great conversations with excellent people — and importantly found out more about (and joined) the United Technologists and Allied Workers union.
Out of these conversations, it seems probable that there is a niche for a UK professional body for progressive technologists — a body that, among other things, represents the views of people who make and use technologies but don’t want to propagate extractive platform capitalism.
If you agree and would like to be part of such a body, then please complete this 5-min survey so we can design the Society in a way that meets the needs of its potential members.
And thank you to everyone who input into the survey design (including Dr Elinor Carmi, Prof Catherine Flick, Paul Waller) and to everyone who has already volunteered to help out turning whatever this might be into something useful.
Also! I won’t send lots of updates about this from this account — if you want to keep in touch with the development of the Society then sign up to this newsletter for updates. Normal vaguely opinionated ramblings will resume here in the near future.
Two events
I’ve been hosting a virtual reading group for the last couple of months, and it’s been a really nice Friday lunchtime opportunity to meet new people and chat with others. The next one is on 9 March; we’ll be discussing Dan McQuillan’s book Resisting AI, and Dan has kindly agreed to join us for a Q&A for the first 30 mins. Reserve your free spot.
I’ll be doing a very brief talk about the Society for Hopeful Technologists at Interesting on 14 May. I think there are some tickets left; if you’re in London that day, you should definitely come along — I’m going to bring some stickers but, more importantly, lots of interesting people are going to talk about extremely interesting things (including, but not limited to, toilets, robotics dancing in the 80s, paving stones, and cosplay).
Byeeeee