Month: August 2016

A THREE-PART BLOGPOST PART ONE of THREE Two Singularities The term “singularity” was first applied to the impact of technology on human affairs back in the 1950s by John von Neuman, one of the founding fathers of computing. He took it from maths and physics, where it means a point at which a variable becomes infinite. The centre of a black hole is a singularity because matter becomes infinitely dense. When you reach a singularity, the normal rules break down, and the future becomes even harder to predict than usual. Since you are reading this blog, you are probably familiar...

Journalists covering the birth of the self-driving car industry are being kept very busy, and sometimes they must worry if they can keep up with all the new announcements. They haven’t even had time to pause for long enough to give the industry a proper name: “self-driving cars” is too long and too ugly. By way of giving them a helping hand, I’d like to suggest “auto-cars”. That was the name for the horseless carriage adopted by The Times of London newspaper in the late 19th century. Linguistic purists objected that it mixed Greek (auto) with Latin (car), so if...