On December 27th, together with other civil society and lobbying organisation representatives, I had the opportunity of meeting Meritxell Batet, Spain’s minister for public administrations and territorial affairs.
The meeting was the latest step taken by a Spanish government to co-design the advance of the transparency agenda in the country. But frustratingly, from my view, the new (socialist) administration has not yet accompanied its public discourse with tangible bold moves.
You can find more details and the take on the meting from Civio’s perspective here.
Coincidentally, a day later I watched Greg Kohs’ insightful AlphaGo documentary. At Iris.ai we are all familiarised with the project’s progress. As a team building an AI science assistant, we have followed this and other DeepMind (now a division of Google) developments quite closely.
Having said this, I truly enjoyed the emotion depicted in the documentary. And in particular, the whole mystique around Game 2’s move 37. Playing black stones, the AI algorithm took the world by storm with a move so beautifully creative that it left everyone, including Lee Sedol, the legendary 18-time go world champion competing as the machine’s opponent, absolutely mesmerised.
Although with truckloads yet to be achieved, that day in March 2016 qualified observers rightly noted that the humanity had just witnessed unprecedented progress towards the production of Machine Leaning based, human-level Artificial Intelligence.
Put together, side-by-side, I found the pair of developments illustrating well how progress can sometimes take the shape of true leaps, whilst more often than not, particularly in social and political activism contexts, other times it is limited to a longer series of smaller, hardly visible steps.
I guess we have to bare that in mind to keep undue frustration at bay. But the trick is to do that without letting it eat anything away from the resolve to try to achieve the targeted ambitious goals in full.
