We clearly can’t trust humans to run the world. Now we’ve gotta try the AIs. Nothing Beats Free! Did you catch up with the troubling book “How Democracies Die” by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt? Hmm the august provenance is already going to be a turnoff for the people who need it most. Anyway, you get the idea. Clearly a key ...
If there’s going to be a Singularity for us humans, won’t there be many for all the animals on this planet? Whales Gonna Have Fun There’s always signals out there that are telling us things we hadn’t thought about. One such is the sudden spate of articles about orcas (you know, killer whales) which are ramming boats off the coast of Spain and Portu...
The received wisdom is that we are headed for the Singularity – where the intelligence of machines exceeds that of humans. But the betting is that we are headed for the Modularity – we will know and understand a lot more about many more things but understand even less about how to control our overall environment. Nothing Like a Good Old-Fashioned C...
Is the Singularity about to hit humanity, unexpectedly? The AI Virus? I don’t have to tell you that le nouveau AI is all over the place. All the big techs are now in it or rapidly getting in but that isn’t the half of the story. The big news is that thousands of companies and organizations are now getting in. They come from all over including our g...
Is ChatGPT independently evolving its own kind of intelligence? A Brain Made of Stone? What would you think if someone told you that animals can make stone tools? No doubt it’s rubbish you would say. What if the animal was an ape, but not human? Even more so. But check it out here (“Sophisticated stone tools may predate humans, study suggests”). Wh...
Banning successful movements like TikTok is the way to lose global leadership, not to regain it. Banning Success the New Autocracy? I guess you have noticed the swelling chorus to ban TikTok, the Chinese uber-social network. The motivation for the ban is the security threat from China represented by TikTok. It has de facto hacking rights over of mi...
Quantum computing looking increasingly likely to be the next tech bubble. What is Quantum? Did you notice that the Nobel in physics has just been awarded to three worthy physicists in the area of quantum information? What’s that you say? I’m the wrong guy to even try to explain it but for dummies like me, see here. It covers esoterica such as qua...
Man Bites Dog So, we don’t see this too often, namely that BMW has invented something for autos that Tesla hasn’t. That would be its car that changes color. Yep. You heard that right. In fact, it uses e-ink to do it, that’s the stuff that Amazon uses in its Kindle. So, it’s not really color, not at this stage anyway, since its black and white all ...
We could soon see a new taxonomy of blockchains emerge, including some based on genomics, that could upend how we build systems and things. The Blob Is Coming I’m sure you’ve heard of blockchains. Of course, they’re hot. That’s partly because of their use in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. But they are being applied to numerous disparate uses as the...
Caption The big social media news is that Facebook is going Meta and metaverse. Will it improve things for the Facebook crowd or make things worse? Now we’re going to have a new type of media which is immersive and allows all kinds of cool things. Be anywhere anytime doing anything, almost in person. Futurati have been dreaming of this for ages. Ma...
I’m in Love with Rocks Consciousness is one of those perennial hardy topics, it just won’t go away but we simply don’t know what it means and how it arises. I’ve even had a little peck at it myself but it’s way above my pay scale (“Shouldn’t AI Apps be Just a Little Bit Conscious?” 20 January, 2021). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t even mor...
Not Another Digital Currency! I’m sure you’re aware of all the buzz around what are referred to as Nonfungible Tokens (NFTs). These are basically a digital token that inherently attests to the fact of the existence of something, let’s call it an Object of Value (OOV) for the sake of convenience. The NFT provides an audit trail to support the attest...
AI is So Passé I suppose you’ve seen that Google is having problems with it’s AI folks. Maybe it needs some AI to fix them? The cobbler’s shoes perhaps? It seems that everyone is using AI in their apps these days. Voice assistants like Alexa are touted for them and who can claim they aren’t getting smarter? If you have an app these days, it might b...
China Again… You might have noticed that a city in China (Suzhou) is conducting a trial of digital money. They have given this money (but note, not Bitcoins) to regular people for free and are letting them spend them online and even in person. Its aimed at exploring the extent to which digital money can be introduced as a regular means of payment a...
I guess you’ve heard the US contention that Huawei chips have a back door that allows the Chinese government to sniff any and all communications through them. Maybe yes, maybe no. But no doubt its possible. I wonder if we are doing it too with the chips that American companies sell to companies overseas? Hmmm, interesting. Getting Deep into the Sub...
You know a field of knowledge is being popularized for the Great Unwashed once psychologists start to talk knowledgeably about it. So, it goes with quantum stuff; what was once the province only of the hard science literati has now entered the sphere of pop media. Quantum Cats Well kind of; cast a glance or two at this one - 'What is quantum cognit...
This AI stuff is so complicated, sigh…There’s all these newfangled algorithms, deep learning, generative adversarial networks, it goes on and on. Isn’t it kind of depressing to feel that without all this stuff, we can’t go to Mars, cure cancer, or invent the next Impossible Burger? And that’s just with the ongoing generation of AI. What about the...
There’s a lot of buzz around Alexa. So is Alexa listening to you? Even recording your calls? What for? Where is she going anyway? Obviously she is getting much smarter. Real conversation is in the offing. So, she’s not just a fount of information, but also maybe a fount of wisdom. The role of digital companion is nigh. Digital soulmate is on the ho...
We live in a scary world. There’s nothing like a scary movie, right? Hear about the latest Godzilla: King of the Monsters? So here’s the latest kind of Godzilla, courtesy of the Russians, namely hypersonic missiles . They go at Mach 5 speed, seriously fast, and you can’t knock them down. That’s scary. Oh, and did we mention that they seem to be nuc...
Did you see that an interplanetary society has just launch a prototype starship powered by a solar sail, aka LightSail? For the ignorami, that’s a gossamer-thin piece of material that catches the light of the Sun which provide propulsive power to the starship. And no, it’s not a new idea. Kepler referred to it, and sci-fi writers such as Jules Vern...
