Articles

Should you short Apple?

Here's a brief history of the human race, plus a glimpse into our near future. A few geological seconds ago, our ancestors discovered that cooking meat made it safer, more nutritious, and longer-lasting.  Cooked food is an efficient fuel, and it enabled the human brain to grow. Brains are expensive in terms of energy: ours use 25% of all the energy we consume.  If you're going to have a bigger brain, you need a more efficient source of energy.  The human brain is not the biggest in the animal kingdom, but it is large proportionate to our size and weight....

Google Glass for Virgins

Virgin Atlantic is trialling Google Glass.  For the next six weeks, Passengers flying Virgin Upper Class from Heathrow's terminal three will be greeted by staff wearing Google's wearable computers.  The Virgin staff will be able to greet their customers by name, and will have immediate access to their preferences for drinks and food.  They will be able to update travellers on weather, flight times, connections, and, well, pretty much anything the internet knows. If the trial goes well it will be rolled out to other locations.  Which prompts the question, is this the first time in history that Heathrow terminal...

Short story prize

Woo-hoo!  My short story The Raid won first prize in a competition run by Dark Places, an online literary magazine.  You can buy it (and four other stories) here for 77 pence - worth every penny!

Our Final Invention – Panel Discussion

A couple of days ago I took part in an online panel discussion of James Barrat's book, "Our Final Invention".  The session was organised by David Wood, chair of the estimable London Futurist Group.  Apart from David, James and me, the other panel members were Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype), and William Hertling (author of the very good "Avogadro Corp.").   Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3sB7Nk-_oI

Startling progress in brain simulation

Researchers claim to have modelled one percent of a human brain, taking 40 minutes to replicate one second of brain activity.  If this is true it is startling, and should be making much bigger headlines than it is. You might wonder why, given that it was only 1% of a brain, and it took so long to model just one second.  But that would be to ignore the power of exponential increase, as recorded in Moore's Law.  As a comment on Reddit pointed out, applying Moore's Law generates this forecast: Jan 2015 - 20 minutes for 1 second of 1%...

Why did Google buy all those robot companies?

Late last year the internet was lit up by the news that Google had bought eight companies that develop and manufacture robots.  A newsworthy development in itself, but what really got people talking was that Google did its buying very quietly, and didn't explain what it wanted all that robot tech for. The move into robotics wasn't taken lightly.  The (undisclosed) cost of the shopping spree probably wasn't enough to have a perceptible impact on Google's torrential cash flow, but it is significant that one of their key talents runs the new department: Andy Rubin, who was responsible for establishing...

Transcendence

The trailer for an intriguing movie has just been released.  Transcendence, which opens in April 2014, stars Johnny Depp, and is directed by Wally Pfister, long-time cameraman and collaborator for Chris Nolan, the director of Inception, and the hugely successful Dark Knight trilogy.  As well as Depp, the strong cast includes Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara (House of Cards) and Rebecca Hall (Iron Man 3). This quote from the trailer explains why the movie is causing excitement among those who think that a conscious machine may be created within the next few decades. "Imagine a machine with...

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...