Voice as Computing
In the 2013 movie ‘Her’, the central character has a love affair with a disembodied voice. The voice begins by making a few tentative inquiries of its owner, but it soon learns his habits and insecurities, and with each interaction, it learns to inveigle itself into...
A chronic shortage of bandwidth
Remember the dial-up internet and the finger tapping timpani it yielded? Well, maybe a new era of the ‘world wide wait’ looms. Global internet traffic is growing by at least 25% a year — far outstripping the current growth in bandwidth with mobile traffic growing at...
The last 200 milliseconds: a timeline for augmented intelligence
An experiment. Hold out your right arm and then slowly flex your wrist. Which comes first – the thought to flex your wrist, or the action itself? In the 1980s, an experiment by the neurologist Benjamin Libet raised some disturbing questions about the extent to which...
Is Facebook a Sin Stock?
Those who want to strictly regulate Facebook or indeed Google or Amazon are baying at the moon. Take the example of Facebook. Yesterday we had the spectacle of Zuckerberg donning sackcloth and ashes before Congress. But this Facebook scandal will be a nine day...
Shenzhen: the next Silicon Valley
In 1986, Toshiba manufactured the first laptop computer in a bid to satisfy Japanese consumers’ needs for space and convenience. It was largely the work of an engineer, Tetsuya Mizoguchi, working on his own steam at the company’s Ome factory, 25 miles outside Tokyo....
How to solve the Meltdown/Spectre problem
Faster, Faster Tech is Running Wild Three Ways to Build a New Architecture Last summer, a group of Google researchers sent Intel a message warning them of an industry-shaking flaw in their chips. This flaw, which allowed access to 'partitioned' kernel memory, allowed...
What to Watch for in 2018 (East Asian Robots, a Memory Shortage and Lithium Battery Crash)
The biggest stories of 2018 Five companies that will surface on your radar this year We need to brace ourselves for even more extreme, non-linear events in 2018 than we saw in 2017, which left markets melting up, with further shrinking in price discovery, and a...
How Long Before the Internet is Throttled?
Invest in "Bottleneck Engineering" Companies highlighted: American Tower, China Tower, Finisar, Luminum, Oclaro, Intel Remember the dial-up internet and the finger tapping timpani it yielded? Well, maybe a new era of the 'world wide wait' looms. Global internet...
The future according to Larry Page
Why Google could be the first trillion dollar company Humans: our place in the IoT A few unusual facts about Larry Page… He believes in the Singularity – and is planning to stay alive long enough for a radical reinvention of human intelligence and anatomy. He believes...