Month: October 2015

Nice Mr Bezos has given me gift vouchers for 25 review copies of Pandora's Brain audio books and 25 review copies of Surviving AI audio books. You get a free book, and when you've listened to it, Amazon gets a review of the book - that's the deal. Gamification is everywhere these days, so these exciting freebies will be awarded for interesting / insightful / funny or even just plain honest completions of one of the two following statements: “The best thing about AI is...” or "The scariest thing about AI is..." Email your full name and your answer to calum@3cs.co.uk. Don't...

Surviving AI is now available at Amazon as an audio book - either as a stand-alone purchase, or (free!) as part of a trial of Amazon's Audible service. Like Pandora's Brain, the audio version of Surviving AI is narrated by Joe Hempel, a talented voice artist who is making quite a name for himself in the world of audio books. It is already a best-seller in two categories. Whether you go to work on the tube or the freeway, turn off the Eagles, and in just four and a half hours, learn all about the promise and peril of our most powerful...

SwiftKey pioneered keyboards with a three-word suggestion bar above the keys that could accurately predict your next word. This was powered by a technology called “n-gram”, an approach now used on more than a billion devices globally. N-gram technology has some limitations, as it can’t capture the underlying meaning of words and can only accurately predict words that have been seen before in the same word sequence. Now, SwiftKey Neural’s intelligent understanding of sentence context introduces a more ‘human’ touch for mobile typing. Using machine learning and enormous amounts of language data, SwiftKey’s neural model is able to capture the...

We are used to thinking about globalisation as a phenomenon involving products. Economic liberals see it as a good thing, enabling the law of comparative advantage to improve the lives of people all over the world, and uniting nations in peaceful trade instead of sundering them in war. Their opponents on both the political left and right see it as a bad thing, impoverishing their own citizens as cheap goods flood in from “over there”. Globalisation is not new. When in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he kicked off a massive wave of globalisation, but it was neither the...