December 14, 2017 – 1:55 pm
Well, the Apocalypse is upon us: the FCC has voted to repeal the Obama-era “Net Neutrality” regulations. This means that the Internet we’ve all come to know and love is finished, over, kaput. The services you love — Google, for example, or perhaps some crotchety old geezer’s curiously named and depressing blog — will henceforward […]
December 6, 2017 – 2:42 pm
This is no small thing: Google’s “Alpha Zero” AI, after taking just 4 hours to teach itself chess, played 100 games against the strongest dedicated chess engine, Stockfish, with decisive results: it won twenty-eight games, drew seventy-two, and lost… zero. We had a good run, humans.
December 3, 2017 – 5:22 pm
Once again this site is bedeviled by a back-end problem that causes new commenters to see the previous commenter’s information in the comment box. When this last came up, in May, it was due to a server-side caching issue at Bluehost that took me a lot of time and effort on the phone to get […]
November 6, 2017 – 9:09 pm
Here’s the future of the automobile, from former GM, Ford, and BMW executive Bob Lutz. I love driving. Glad I got the chance, I guess.
October 24, 2017 – 12:02 pm
Here is David Bowie, in a 1999 interview, predicting in considerable detail the transformative, revolutionary effect of the Internet on media and culture.
October 17, 2017 – 11:51 pm
Ah, Diversity. How its worship enriches us! It doesn’t, of course. But it does, at least, make for some last-minute entertainment, here on the deck of the Titanic. There are some areas of human activity that lie forever beyond the reach of heartfelt wishes and fond imaginings: places where reality is still there even after […]
August 29, 2017 – 11:01 pm
Sorry it’s been so slow around here. It’s August, when I always take it easy a bit — but I’ll confess that I’m also getting a little spooked by the extent to which we are all (and I’m no exception) living more and more of our lives online. Our attention, which is more precious than […]
August 18, 2017 – 5:03 pm
Last week a Google engineer expressed, in a perfectly reasonable memorandum about human diversity, the view that the company had become a left-wing monoculture in which dissenters actually might have to worry about being fired. For publishing this essay, he was fired. Now Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has announced that the company is giving a […]
Here’s a provocative item from Wired: a skeptic’s take on the idea of superhuman AI, by one Kevin Kelly. I haven’t time to comment on it now, other than to say that once you get past the “there are all kinds of intelligence” boilerplate, it raises some interesting points.
I predict: Before too much longer, new cars will come with an autonomous, “self-driving” mode. In the beginning, at least, this will be an option that drivers can switch on or off. There will be a great many married couples of “a certain age” in which the wife will want the husband to use the […]
February 14, 2017 – 1:36 pm
Our previous post touched on the inexorable encroachment of sensors and listening devices into every cranny of our lives. In the comment-thread I mentioned a “particular nightmare” of my own, and said I’d describe it in a new post. It is this: given the exponential advances being made in brain-machine interfaces and nanotech, I see […]
February 11, 2017 – 3:45 pm
One thing I’ve been awfully leery of is the proliferation of sensors of every sort in every part of our environment. In particular I’m edgy about the new generation of devices, such as Amazon’s Echo, that just sit in your house and listen. I realize that this ship has already sailed, really, in that we […]
January 11, 2017 – 9:54 pm
This is fantastic: a centrifuge, spinning at up to 125,000 RPM, made out of paper and string. Brilliant. Here.
October 24, 2016 – 7:28 pm
You’ve probably heard of “quantum computing”, but you may not know what it is. Here is a piece by Peter Diamandis, of Singularity University, that gives a helpful introduction to the key idea: that the bizarre “superposition” of a particle’s unmeasured quantum states makes it possible for n quantum bits (or “qubits”) to do the […]
From Stephen Hsu’s blog, here’s a video of an hour-long panel discussion with Dr. Hsu, Steven Pinker, and Dalton Conley on the subject of genetic engineering and the heritability of human traits, particularly intelligence. This topic is a minefield in the West, and so great care is taken, and necessary pieties uttered — and some […]
Here’s a nice visualization of sorting algorithms. (If you’re interested.)
March 31, 2016 – 11:29 am
Here’s the latest really cool thing that you absolutely must have. It just stands in your room, listening to everything you say, and transmitting it over the Internet to… someplace. It’s only $129, and it’s “always getting smarter”! Crisp Dolby Sound! Everybody’s going to want one. Don’t be left out!
I am not making this up: apparently Microsoft put a Twitter chat-bot online as part of an artificial-intelligence project, and after a few hours of online interaction it had turned into a Nazi. Microsoft has since deleted its tweets, but some more of them are here. The bot, called Tay, has now been taken down […]
March 16, 2016 – 10:31 pm
Our pal Kevin Kim posted an item last week about the shuttering of Barnes & Noble’s Nook operation. (For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about — and it warms my heart that there may in fact be some of you out there — the Nook is Barnes & Noble’s electronic-book […]
In yesterday’s post about the encryption controversy, I wrote: My own feeling is that, death-by-government having had a vastly higher body count over the past century or so than even the bloodiest wars (and astronomically higher than any act of terrorism), we should choose to protect our privacy. Just in case. A commenter argued for […]
By now you have all heard of the DOJ’s effort to force Apple to unlock a phone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terror attack. Here again we have an example of technology advancing far too quickly for our sluggish political institutions to keep up. Codes and ciphers are as old […]
Here is something I had not heard about until today: it appears that water infused with tiny bubbles (and I mean really tiny, with diameters near the wavelength of visible light), has many useful properties. My first glimpse of this was here. I’m curious to learn more. Here’s a remarkable statement (my emphasis): Some studies […]
February 28, 2016 – 10:29 pm
Our previous post argued that because the world is now changing faster than it ever has, with even the pace of change itself accelerating sharply, any conservative or reactionary ideology that seeks simply to roll back the clock is doomed to fail. What I said was that any hope for an effective New Right depended […]
February 12, 2016 – 10:25 pm
Here’s your frisson du jour.
January 22, 2016 – 10:20 pm
My boy Nick just sent me a link to a YouTube channel that you might find interesting. (I did.) Here.
December 23, 2015 – 11:59 pm
I’ve written before about the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom. His work is concerned with the long-term prospects of the human race, with particular interest in the future of artificial intelligence, and its perils. In these pages we’ve mentioned his suggestion that we might already be living in a computer simulation (see here and here), as […]
December 18, 2015 – 7:33 pm
Self-driving cars, like 3-D printing, are a promising technology with quite a way to go before achieving their transformative potential. (See our post on one of the ethical questions they raise, here.) An item published yesterday at Bloomberg Business describes a hard problem the people designing them must face: how fast should the cars go? […]
December 18, 2015 – 12:15 am
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but this stuff is going to be big. Call your broker.
November 4, 2015 – 5:41 pm
Where we’ve got to with humanoid robots, here.
October 3, 2015 – 10:36 am
In today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I recommend again to you all), we find a link to the following story: Incident of drunk man kicking humanoid robot raises legal questions We read: A few weeks ago, a drunk man in Japan was arrested for kicking a humanoid robot that was stationed as a greeter at a […]
OK, this is interesting: ‘Impossible’ rocket drive works and could get to Moon in four hours Some details here.
Making the rounds today is a neural-network project from Google called DeepDream. It’s an open-source effort to train neural networks to recognize images (for you programmers, the code is here). I haven’t had any time to give this a close look, but if I understand correctly, when the system is presented with an unfamiliar image […]
The Supreme Court ruled today on a case about the constitutionality of lethal injection. From the Washington Post: The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 on Monday to uphold a procedure used by states to carry out executions by lethal injection. The justices were considering a challenge brought by death-row inmates in Oklahoma, who allege […]
We’ve been hearing a lot, lately, about Rachel Dolezal, Bruce Jenner, and other stories of historic magnitude, but awfully little about China’s “hack” of the Office of Personnel Management’s records — which, in this Information Age, is roughly on a par with Pearl Harbor. Why put “hack” in scarequotes? Because — wait for it — […]
There’s an item in the Independent today announcing that “Self-driving cars may have to be programmed to kill you“. As is so often the case, dear Readers, you heard it here first.
This should worry you: The Shaming of Cheryl Rios Because the world has got so small, everything collides with everything else. Attention from all parts of this flattened, shrunken system can swivel to focus on any node at any time — and attention can exalt or destroy. In this case, it is like stereotactic radiosurgery: […]
February 16, 2015 – 11:33 pm
On February 26th, a five-member panel of FCC commissioners will vote on adopting a plan to apply government regulation to various aspects of the operation of the Internet. This will undoubtedly have far-reaching effects — and given the scale of the Federal government, of the Internet, and of the conflicting interests that will be affected, […]
December 19, 2014 – 10:12 pm
Here’s something else that the Sony hacking story has me thinking about: the ‘arms race’ between hackers and cybersecurity. There have been a lot of high-profile cyberattacks lately, and if anything, they seem to be getting more frequent, and more damaging. What’s worse, more and more of every aspect of our lives, and of every […]
August 8, 2014 – 12:20 pm
There’s a lot of buzz lately about self-driving cars. They were the focus of a couple of sessions when I was at Singularity University a couple of years ago, and while I was there Google sent one over so we could get a look at it. The consensus at SU was that they confer so […]
I’ve just read an outstanding essay on the paucity of women in high-tech jobs, and the stubbornly persistent (and demonstrably counterfactual) belief that it is caused, not by natural differences between the sexes, but by an invisible fog of sexism. I’d sum up its arguments for you, but it’s so good you should go and […]
I have to say, this is pretty titillating. It’s also the first I’m hearing about this sort of thing as a realistic possibility, and I wonder how seriously to take it. (The article says this rig can get to Alpha Centauri and back in a month. I assume that’s ship’s time, and so we’d still […]
Google’s just revealed its workplace demographics. The breakdown for tech workers: 60% white, 34% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 1% black. Pass the popcorn. Addendum, 5/29: I neglected to add above that the breakdown by sex is: women 17%, men 83%. Nobody should be surprised by any of this. To get through the multilevel Google tech interview, […]
Writing at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald reports on an item from the collection of classified material leaked by Edward Snowden: a report on the ways that “Western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction”. I can’t say that any of it should come as a […]
We’ve been hearing for years that the only way America can stay ‘competitive’ is to admit hordes of foreign engineers to supplement our inadequate supply of homegrown STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) workers. The constant influx of these workers on H-1B visas has kept wages in these fields from rising for many years now. But […]
Just in case, loyal Readers, you happen to be looking for a fat tax write-off; and supposing also that you’ve been troubled lately by how hard it is for aging, pallid reactionary male bloggers just to get around without being interfered with by resentful Progressive mobs, here’s the perfect way to kill two birds with […]
A simple explanation from Randall Munroe.
A story that’s making the rounds today concerns trending changes in the way people read. Here’s the lede, from today’s Washington Post: Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, […]
My Android phone just had a stroke, and I had to do a factory reset. I lost all my applications, which meant I had to go rummaging around to replace them. It’s turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I’ve found some nifty new ones, and after blasting away all the cruft that […]
February 27, 2014 – 12:16 pm
In a Takimag article called Useless Mouths, John Derbyshire looks at the road ahead, as technology displaces more and more workers. I recall that this sort of gloomy forecast was common when I was a boy, but I think this time round it’s more on the mark. (Barring a Butlerian Jihad, that is.) Things have […]