“There is something marvelous in the fact that we barely understand what most of the cells in our brains are doing.”
— Carl Zimmer (Discover magazine, September 2009)
Brain Cells
Reply
Category Archives: Science & Technology
Smart glasses
I’d pay $1,000 for really smart eyeglasses. People who have LASIK surgery tend to rave about how it changed their lives for the better. Fortunately I’ve been blessed with good vision because I just don’t think I could let someone cut on my eyes unless there was no option. These surgical (?) techniques will — I assume — get better and better. That’s a good but I’m counting on eye glasses getting smarter.
A lens that could monitor what’s happening with my eyes as well as my surroundings (light, motion, etc), and adjust on the fly. Reading a book, looking at a laptop screen or a mobile device; watching TV or a movie.
One more thing. A coating on the lens that is impervious to greasy fingerprints.
Car dealerships are doomed
Long-time auto exec Bob Lutz thinks car dealerships are doomed. They have 20 to 25 years left. Autonomous vehicles will completely disrupt the industry.
”Are they going to be fun? Absolutely not,” he said. “There will be no joy in sitting in an autonomous vehicle …. But it’s going to be enormously efficient.”
He suggested that parents will be willing to place their children in autonomous cars to take them to day care, soccer practice or school. He said they would be able to give their children limited access to a vehicle subscription service that would let them call cars to take them to preapproved locations, and that access could be expanded as they get older.
”When you send them off to college, you won’t send them with a car, you’ll send them with a subscription to a driverless vehicle service that they can use at their leisure,” he said.
I think it’s been a long time since cars were cool (not that I was ever a car guy). They’re all look like gray blobs of molded plastic. Lutz says the car of the future will just be a “module.”
He likened the modules to subway cars: Passengers don’t know who makes them, only that they get the riders to their destinations.
If I can drive my (mythical) Land Rover for five or ten years — and it’s as much fun as I hope it is — I’ll count myself lucky.
How Blockchain is Reconstructing Marketplaces
Yuval Noah Harari: Will the Future Be Human?
Historian Yuval Harari at the World Economic Forum earlier this year. He covers so many big ideas in half an hour. (“Algorithms will understand us better than we understand ourselves.”)
Understanding Technology (Time Bandits)
Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble
Excerpts from a really good article by Steven Johnson in the New York Times.
The real promise of these new technologies, many of their evangelists believe, lies not in displacing our currencies but in replacing much of what we now think of as the internet, while at the same time returning the online world to a more decentralized and egalitarian system. If you believe the evangelists, the blockchain is the future. But it is also a way of getting back to the internet’s roots.
After a period of experimentation in which we dabbled in social-media start-ups like Myspace and Friendster, the market settled on what is essentially a proprietary standard for establishing who you are and whom you know. That standard is Facebook.
What Nakamoto ushered into the world was a way of agreeing on the contents of a database without anyone being “in charge” of the database, and a way of compensating people for helping make that database more valuable, without those people being on an official payroll or owning shares in a corporate entity.
If you think the internet is not working in its current incarnation, you can’t change the system through think-pieces and F.C.C. regulations alone. You need new code.
Blockchain metaphors
As Blockchain gains more acceptance (not talking about cryptocurrencies now but the underlying tech) I’m seeing more and more metaphors that try to help people grasp the concept. This article compares Blockchain to sharing Google Docs, as opposed to bouncing a MS Word doc back and forth. The DNA metaphor didn’t really work for me. My favorite was the transparent safes (from online forum Bitcoin Talk).
“Imagine there are a bunch of safes lined up in a giant room somewhere. Each safe has a number on it identifying it, and each safe has a slot that allows people to drop money into it. The safes are all made of bulletproof glass, so anybody can see how much is in any given safe, and anybody can put money in any safe. When you open a bitcoin account, you are given an empty safe and the key to that safe. You take note of which number is on your safe, and when somebody wants to send you money, you tell them which safe is yours, and they can go drop money in the slot.”
This reminds me of the early days of “the cloud” and how people struggled to comprehend where their files were if they weren’t on their computer.
Honda Robotic Workhorse
If I’m still around in ten years, I’ll own one of these. And think of how damned good they’ll be in ten years.
AI in Voice Forensics
AI is now so advanced that it can reveal far more about you than a mere fingerprint. By using powerful technology to analyse recorded speech, scientists today can make confident predictions about everything from the speaker’s physical characteristics – their height, weight, facial structure and age, for example – to their socioeconomic background, level of income and even the state of their physical and mental health.
Your voice can give away plenty of environmental information, too. For example, the technology can guess the size of the room in which someone is speaking, whether it has windows and even what its walls are made of. Even more impressively, perhaps, the AI can detect signatures left in the recording by fluctuations in the local electrical grid, and can then match these to specific databases to give a very good idea of the caller’s physical location and the exact time of day they picked up the phone.
One of the leading scientists in this field is Rita Singh of Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. Interview with Ms. Singh