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...
I’m sure everyone has heard of mindfulness. It’s the new religion for curing stress, of which there seems to be quite a lot. Salespeople are hardly known for being meditative, so when they pick up knitting as a (secular) religion, you know there’s something going on. The buzzword is mindful knitting, by the way. And that’s not all, not even the lea...
I guess you are all aware of the US decision to withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Weapons Treaty (INF)? In defense of the decision its clear that the Russians have flouted it for many years. So, does this make nuclear war more likely, or less? Well, Putin just threatened the US with its new hypersonic weapons if the US puts more weapons ...
I don’t have to tell you that Big Data is hot. Almost Godly really. And happiness is a perennial as old as mankind itself. Wouldn’t it be nice if they both played nice together? Why shouldn’t they anyway? These thoughts come from after reading a book by Mo Gawdat, Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy. The author is a Google executive and the ...
Sigh, I can’t help taking aim at AI. It’s just so fashionable and politically correct. Ask anyone in leadership positions in politics or the private sector what the future is, and they will all tell you seriously it’s all AI, OF COURSE. I have this pressing need to knock down shibboleths, even it they are good ones. So here goes. Here’s my question...
You know the Turing test, right? You communicate with a computer by typing and it must guess if you’re a human or an AI. The test has been run for many years. Usually the humans have won but the AIs are catching up. So now some inventive academics (yep, they even exist) have devised a new Turing test; instead of doing a typed conversation you just ...
With AIs it’s all about intelligence and smarts. Can they think better than us? Will they make better decisions? And so on. Probably the answer to all of these questions is yes, eventually if not sooner. I’m a (poor and slow) runner so I like to read books about running to see how the really good ones perform. I just read the semi-autobiography of ...
So the talk of the town, biologically speaking anyway, is CRISPR Cas9 (ok dumbbells, here’s the Cliff Notes version). It’s the new way to slice and dice genes. Actually it’s unbelievably amazing, at least to my tiny mind. Now scientists can cut and paste genes like word-processing bread (HUH?). Anyway you get the idea. Now we are the verge of bei...
So the movie “2001 – A Space Odyssey” has just been re-released. I saw it when it was first released and I didn’t understand it even then. No doubt I will be none the wiser this time around. But one thing still sticks in my mind; HAL, the mission computer had a bad case of mental ill-health. “2001” was a prescient work in so many ways. I think th...
Facebook has been roasted lately due to its user privacy issues, not to mention its hosting of those infamous fake news feeds. No good deed goes unvarnished… But I guess they’re not the only ones to have that problem: how about the Federal Office of Personnel Management where 4 million personnel records were stolen by hackers, including probably ...
So now several people have been killed in accidents in self-driving cars. What gives? I’ve been driving for many years but I don’t regard myself as a good driver. For one thing I've got poor eyesight. I get easily confused at night and sometime in heavy traffic conditions. Here are three of the driving situations in which I feel most uncomfortabl...
