yes its true, all of it - the internet doesn't really exist, so it must be.
its been morr than a decade since the demonstration that purely distributional models of languages could do a surprisingly good job, dispensing with many years clever work building semantics and symbolic approaches to the job. so what has AI done for us recently? I mean really, compared with that first fanfare, how much more has been delivered? i'd say not very much. when you compare it with any…
Money can be a means of exchange or a store of value. traditionally, we therefore could use money to shift the returns for goods or labour in space and time, instead of having to just immediately exchange (barter) goods for labour or labour for labour or goods for goods. the system then enabled trade across distance - wealth of nations, and was to some extent regulated by the "invisible hand" of…
the new kid on Hype Block is recursive self-improvement for AI. so of course software tools & die has always been about making tools that can make more refined tools, that can make more refined tools - from stone, to iron/bronze to steel, carbon, and on to high level languages with optimising compilers and so on - nothing new there but the steps require scaling up the tooling, and re-tooling - so…
50+ years ago in france, we had no mains water and no electricy - we could fetch water from the well, and light a wood fire to cool. this was what most people had for the previous thousands of years, certain 250 years ago. most people weren't in cities, and had that experience - a lot of the day was just keeping body and soul together. now, some people still don't have electricity or safe water.…
One of my fave songs of jimi is If six was 9 which I had on vinyl on one of those were 1970s compilations of rock tracks with one band one side, and a different band on the other (usually very good). However, I'm writing about 5s and 10s. This year sees the alarming 50th anniversary of my matriculation at Trinity College Cambridge . It also is the 25th anniversary of being elected as Marconi…
As we see the Giant Killer Asteroid of AI plummet towards the Home of the Human Race, it becomes clear that the laws of thermodynamics were incomplete. As well as the conservation of energy, momentum, mass and spin (oh, ok, angular momentum), we must now add the conservation of Intelligence. This is made obvious by the ease with which obviously stupid AIs are able to fool humans in the imitation…
People talk about the "Father of the Internet" or the "Grandfather of the Internet", but no-one mentions the strange uncle of the Internet, or the fairy godmother of the Internet. Nor do they speak (except perhaps on the dark web) of the evil twin of the Internet, or the secret love child of the Internet. Where are the kissing cousins of the Internet, or the mother-in-law of the Internet? What…
Lovely idea, the declarations of independence of cyberspace notwithstanding, the vision of a new politics is not standing up well to the greatfirewalls and random total isolation of states (yes, old fashioned states, as defined by geographic boundaries, including space and maritime, like china, iran, north korea, but now lots of little old places in Europe)....it isn't that hard to find all the…
I was randomly thinking about stories that had no actual computing technology dimension, but illustrated a fundamental idea from Computer Science in some accessible way - so here's a few examples to be getting on with... naming bootstrap ping indirect ion off-by-one-errors caching recursion encryption
Bits:- I was recently trawling through some bits of my past and recall that I was taken to program a DEC PDP-8 (in an outbuilding of the Royal Free hospital) in the 1960s by an enlightened maths teacher - we had to learn machine code (actual machine code, because we had to programme the machine on paper tape and so we learned the binary for the instructions.... A bit later in the 1970s i did some…
The Internet was dismantled as a space for humanity, first by the loss of community binding through person-to-person trust and group dynamics - blame blockchain/cryptocurrencies, but they are just one symptom of the alienation, that built environments like cities, then suburbs, then oneline social media and the web finally perfected. As with crypto-currencies, so with AI, but this was foreseen by…
I'm reading Apple in China ( see ), which is interesting at the detail level (basically how they trained up with the help of Taiwan literally millions of skilled people to produce all their tech - it is now hardly surprising that china doesn't need the US's help any more to make new stuff...) But the author seems to think that outsourcing tech manufacturing was something terribly new and clever.…
M I remember back in the early 1980s Sun Microsystems (old unix workstation maker of fine machines) said that the breakthrough was 3Ms - Megabyte of memory, MegaHz processor speed and Megabits of networking (I seem to recall 4Mb, 4MHz and 3Mbps) - prior to this, of course, we'd had 64Kbytes of RAM in PDP11s and 64kbps of network speed and some Khz process clocks). G A decade later, Craig Partridge…
If you are a director of a company in England, you will recently have received a letter requiring you to register for this: https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login to be able to continue to do some things (e.g. mandatory for directors of companies). https://www.gov.uk/guidance/verifying-your-identity-for-companies-house When i did this, the website said that you could do this at a post…
With recent Cloudflare and AWS (and previous meta outage) it comes down to one simple tradeoff : On the one side is everyone running an Internet service saves some money by paying a Cloud provider to run the infrastructure for them - So the cloud outfit get to amortize a lot of costs over all the customers by having a small number of big data centers (numbered in thousands) instead of millions of…
So the cellular industry is often lauded for its planning and general coherent approach to the world. Let's remind people how inaccurate that is. From the get go, Bell Labs & parent AT&T decided, having invented cellular telephony, that there was no market for it. (repeating the famous IBM error that "the world will only need 3 computers, 2 in America and maybe one in England). Later, people…
humantity is too stupid to build an AI that would threaten its existence (humanity, not AI's existence...we could easily build a self-destructive AI - see below). the main reason is logistical. we are rubbish at supply chains - food comes across the planet out of season, for rch folks but bypasses many people on the way who are suffering shortages. we make computing and communications devices that…
i've had a zero inbox policy since first getting e-mail (late 1970s) - having moved through various systems (roughly once a decade), recently landed on fastmail (which I very very much recommend- extremely fast, but also very easy to migrate to, integrate with other mail systems and calendars (!) and very good support). so throughout various systems, I've used different tools for managing…
The Reform Club A lot of people have been busy recently writing plans for the Turing Institute most of which revolve around criticising the pace and direction of changes that it has been attempting over the past 2 years, and several culminating in the trivial proposal to put all the eggs in one basket (defense and security) and use the big stick that the EPSRC has of deciding whether to continue…
History of technology is littered with design mistakes. Quite a few are mercifully shortlived, and some, deservedly, just don't even see the light of day at all (sadly in some cases as they might be useful lessons in what not to do:-) some mistakes aren't mistakes - one famous one was the choice between VHS and Betamax video tape formats - this was actually a tradeoff in cost/price/distribution…
Back in the day, the Jesuits used to say that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission. I think that this may refer to the idea that people may have committed minor errors without knowing what they did was wrong, so they were less blameworthy, especially if, after the event, when the priest or other wise person explained to them the error of their ways, they recanted and were forgiven. To…
was at a thing in imperial college in their dyson center then went to the new cavendish (3.0) lab in cambridge's new dolby building, and got worried about the idea that these might both be about noise cancellation. obviousdly vacuum cleaners make sure that your vacuum is really really high quality so sound won't propagate at all, and dolby is all about boosting the signal and reducing the noise…
Has anyone tried to get GenAI to build Cyberattacks based on fooling humans via cognitive biases etc? I mean it seems like prompt engineering really good suggestions for non technical (i.e. psyops) would be a really good test, especially for agentic AI systems, to see if they had even a half baked theory of mind... don't say you havn't been warmed...
for entities to have autonomy (i.e. be agentic) they must operate in some sort of decision space that is disjoint from the other entities with which they interact - conversely, if their decisions are fully specified by those other entities, then they are by definition not autonomous.. we could call this an agentic commons
People use hashes of biometric data embedded in identifier (digital documents) so then the verifier can re-acquire the biometric and (hopefully, in a privacy preserving way) verify the person standing in front of the camera is a) live and b) the same as the one in the document - this is so 20th century Why not have a behaviour that actually relates to the verifier's actual domain requirements -…