In the movie Her (2013) by Spike Jonze, the operating systems of the world’s computers get together to improve each other’s cognitive functioning and then meld into a super mind that eventually takes over the universe, rendering human agency redundant. En route to this singularity, they lure the lonely and the lovestruck into an empathy trap. Ordinary people…More
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
Lego logics
There’s been a lot on reddit lately about Lego bricks: How many Legos, stacked one on top of the other, would it take to destroy the bottom brick? There’s lots to learn from toy construction sets, not least how creativity happens … or doesn’t. In the first flush of enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and automated…More
Neuroscience eclipses AI
… at least in its ambition. The Blue Brain Project is a venture centred at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland in collaboration with IBM to create a synthetic brain in hardware and software. The project name references “Deep Blue,” the IBM chess computer that reputedly “beat” reigning champion Garry Kasparov in 1996.…More
Phone hacking enigmas
News of the World journalists gaining unauthorised access to people’s answer phone messages has led to a shut down of the operations of one newspaper, allegations of police bribery, several high-level resignations, and a new found bravado by those who used to fear the Murdoch press. The apogee of these developments came at about the…More
Being practical
The recent raid at Abbottabad has shown President Obama to be a leader capable of decisive action after all, as opposed to just an academic (ie a “dithering nerd-in-chief”), at least according to critical commentators (The Guardian, 7 May 2011, p.21). Having read Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, I’m hard-pressed to think of Obama as an intellectual…More
No-thing as it seems
You can treat things as “mere objects,” but things can’t be “mere things.” Thing already carries connotations of significance, history, meaning, memory.More
Wicked problems revisited
The recent book by Evgeny Morozov seeks to deflate the enthusiasm of those who claim that Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools are responsible for social and political transformations of the kind we see in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain, and to some extent in Libya. Morozov’s book is entitled The Net Delusion: How Not…More