Tech firms need to remember that people are bad

Algorithms and tech systems fail to consider the real world and the people in it, including the residents of London

- Nicole Kobie

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro's Futures editor. She loves living in London. Everyone is bonkers, so she fits in.

Technology developers live and breathe in blocks world. This isn’t an insult – though they often behave like block heads – nor is it a weird reference to Minecraft.

Blocks world refers to the simplified environments created by technology developers to test their ideas. Back in 1991, Rodney Brooks went viral – or whatever it was called back then – for his paper “Intelligence Without Representation” that criticised the way robotics et al were stuck in blocks worlds rather than being developed to work in the real world.

AI and related technologies required “experiments with real creatures in real worlds” he said, to see if they really worked. (He went on to co-found iRobot, which made Roombas a common household item, so he was certainly correct about a lot of things.)

Blocks worlds persist in innovation. Whenever new technology is rolled out in the real world, the creators seem to forget that humans exist – even though the products are usually designed to interface with us meat bags.

❝ No matter how smart your tech, if you leave bikes around London, people will use them in creative and terrible ways. This is just the way of things"