Category: All articles

Virtual reality – for real?

$75m is a large investment for a one year-old company, even for Silicon Valley in these excitable times.  Oculus VR has just added that sum to its previous $18.4m Kickstarter and series A rounds. The reason for the excitement is that the Oculus Rift headset just might be the first product to provide a genuine virtual reality experience for consumers.  Only 300 people have tried the current prototype, but over 42,000 people have bought developer kits based on its predecessor. Previous VR products have failed to provide a genuinely realistic environment, and some have made users feel dizzy or nauseous. ...

Europe hits the gas pedal on driverless cars

There is no longer any doubt that driverless cars are coming.  Google recently announced that its test cars have completed half a million miles, with a flawless safety record. It hopes the technology will be available to the public in 2017.  Elon Musk, of PayPal and Space X fame, hopes that his electric car company Tesla Motors will have autonomous cars ready a year earlier. Outside the USA, governments and manufacturers don't want to be left behind.  Nissan has carried out the first public road test of an autonomous vehicle on a Japanese highway, and now European governments are getting...

Hollywood passes the Turing Test

When will a computer pass the Turing Test?  December 18th.  Well, according to Hollywood, anyway.  That's when "Her", a film by Spike Jonze, opens in the US.  Critics who saw it at the New York Film Festival in October liked it enough to give it a 100% fresh rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review site, and Scarlett Johansson is being talked about as a serious Oscar contender even though she never actually appears in the film. The plot involves a sensitive man played by Joaquin Phoenix who is upset by the failure of a long-term relationship.  He falls in love with...

Building muscle at Calico, Google’s health moonshot

Google made waves in September when it launched its health research arm Calico, led by Arthur Levinson, the former CEO of Roche's US biotech company Genentech. Calico has now announced the hire of four heavy-hitters from the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.  Not surprisingly, three of them have connections with Genentech.  Dr Hal Barron was chief medical officer of Roche, which acquired Genentech in 2009 for $50bn.  He becomes president of R&D at Calico. Dr David Botstein, who joins Calico as chief scientific officer, was VP of Genentech in the late 1980s before moving to academia at Princeton, and Dr Bob Cohen leaves...

What is it about Canadians and quantum computing?

A Canadian company called D:Wave has the best claim to be making and selling quantum computers.  Now a research team at Canada's Simon Fraser University has announced that it has held a quantum memory state stable at room temperature for 39 minutes.  This is 100 times longer than the previous record, and it has got the scientific community excited. In conventional computers, "bits" of data are stored as a string of 1s and 0s.  In a quantum system, quantum bits, or "qubits" are stored in a so-called "superposition state" in which they can be both 1s and 0 at the...

Automation or liberation?

People get worried about automation.  Every time Google's driverless cars hit the headlines, journalists fret that the people who drive lorries, taxis, buses and so on - will soon be out of a job.  It's probably not true.  Trains have drivers even though they can't be steered.  Planes have pilots even though much of the flying process is automated.  Lorries, taxis and buses are likely to have humans in charge of them for many years to come, even if only to sort out the problem when they break down, or when passengers or cargo create an unexpected situation.  With any...

Google Glass takes the broader view

Google has several thousand people test-driving its optical head-mounted display product known as Google Glass.  Each of these people has just been asked to invite three other people to join in and become "Explorers".  If you're reading this anywhere outside the USA you can put your phone back down as the programme is only available to US residents over 18 years old. Meanwhile, Marc Levoy, a Stanford professor, claims that Google's first foray into wearable computing will give its users "superhero vision".  And he should know, since he's has just finished a two-year sabbatical working on the Glass project.  He...

Neuroscience hat trick

Three significant announcements in one week!  Neuroscience is galloping ahead, thanks to improved scanning techniques, and also to Moore's Law, which allows bigger and bigger data sets to be acquired and analysed.  You need that when you're studying the most complex thing known to man. Perhaps the most interesting of the three is a review of what happens in the brain when its owner loses consciousness.  A team at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 12 healthy volunteers to see how information flows changed inside their brains as they lost consciousness...

Eavesdropping on the brain

Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine claim to have identified a brain region which is uniquely responsible for mathematical thinking.  Say hello to your intraparietal sulcus, or IPS: it's what provides your numeracy (or lack of it).  The IPS is activated when (and only when) you think about numbers, including imprecise quantitative terms such as “more than”. One of the interesting aspects of this study is the unusual way the researchers obtained their data.  Brain studies are usually carried out on patients lying immobile inside MRI scanners, which are huge, clunky, and noisy machines with giant magnets.  Or they...

Alzheimer’s breakthrough?

The headlines today (10th October) suggest that a cure for Alzheimer's is imminent. Well, not quite.Scientists at the University of Leicester have arrested brain cell death from prion disease in mice.  This is reported to be the first proof that neuro-degeneration can be delayed in any living animal. Many neurodegenerative diseases involve the production of "mis-folded" proteins, or prions. In Parkinson's the alpha-synuclein protein goes wrong, in Alzheimer's it's the amyloid and tau proteins, and in Huntington's it's the Huntington protein.  The brain responds by shutting down local protein production for so long that the cells are eventually destroyed.  By targeting the...

The Human Brain Project has officially begun

Today (Monday, October 7), the Human Brain Project (HBP) has officially begun.  Scientists from 135 institutions met at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland to kick off what is described as “the world’s most ambitious neuroscience project”. The HBP was selected as one of the EU's flagship research project a full nine months ago.  I'm guessing that by Brussels standards, this represents quite rapid progress. The Human Brain Project’s initial mission is to develop six research platforms: neuro-informatics, brain simulation, high-performance computing, medical informatics, neuro-morphic computing and neuro-robotics. The neuro-informatics platform will build a map of all the brain’s...

3D printing at an inflection point

3D printing is not directly connected with the development of AI, or conscious machines.  But it is probably one of the wake-up technologies for people outside the bubble that takes an active interest in AGI.  These are the innovations that may alert people to the fact that technology in general is moving increasingly fast, and is going to change our lives dramatically.  The other obvious ones are wearable computing and augmented reality (Google Glass), driverless cars, automation by task-specific AI, and increasingly smart robots in military, industrial and domestic settings. The respected IT research outfit Gartner has just issued a...

What is Calico?

The launch last week of Google's Calico - California Life Company - is an important step in the battle against ageing.  But we still don't know whether it is a head-on charge against death itself, or an incremental approach, tackling individual diseases with Big Data.  The distinction is, well, a matter of life and death. Aubrey de Grey is Chief Science Officer of SENS, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.  He thinks that by repairing seven types of molecular and cellular damage to the body which are caused by our basic metabolic processes, we can halt the ageing...

Robots in agriculture

This cute little chap is Harvey, a robotic shifter of pot plants.  Pot plants need to be moved around a lot within nurseries as they grow, for instance to allow the right spacing between them.  It is tedious, time-consuming work, but Harvey doesn't mind.  Using sophisticated on-board sensors and simple programming, he can reliably shuffle his charges from here to there and back again.  And again...  And with a price tag of $30,000, the manufacturers are confident he will be cost-effective for many growers. The management of pot plants is not the most obvious application of the emerging robotics industry...

Google’s quantum computer

This is a post-script to my recent post on Eric Schmidt saying that the Turing Test would be passed within five years.  An interview with a pioneer in quantum computing suggests that Google just might be hoping to build a human-level AI in that sort of time frame. Google has recently bought a quantum computer from D-Wave, and during a long but fascinating webcast interview on Singularity 1 on 1, Geordie Rose, founder and Chief Technology Officer at D-Wave Computers, talked about how D-Wave is a key partner in Google's programme to develop machine intelligence.  Rose did not commit to any timelines, but when...

Mr Geek goes to Washington?

The Economist claims that technology plutocrats are starting to engage with the US political process in a more comprehensive way than they have previously deigned to do. The paper cites Steve Jobs as typical of the existing attitude.  After hosting a dinner with Barack Obama and some fellow tycoons, he reportedly complained “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done. It infuriates me.” The Economist argues that earlier interventions in Washington from Silicon Valley have been limited to specific issues, but now an organisation called FWD.us, a campaign for immigration reform (seeking...

The Turing Test to be passed within five years – Eric Schmidt

“Many people in AI believe that we’re close to [a computer passing the Turing Test] within the next five years.”  So said Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, speaking at The Aspen Institute last month. The Turing Test, of course, was proposed in 1950 by brilliant computer pioneer Alan Turing as a way to decide whether a machine could be said to think. The Turing Test has many critics, but it seems to me that if a computer convinces a panel of humans that it has human-level consciousness and intelligence then we will have to accept that it is correct.  After all, that is...