Premium bond mythbusting
One of yesterday’s budget announcements was the lowering of the minimum premium bond purchase from £100 to £25 by March 2019. Inevitably the usual conspiracy theorists and/or people who don’t...
View ArticleArtificial intelligence is (mostly) not intelligent
I last wrote about artificial intelligence here in February 2014. Four and a half years ago it wasn’t something that very many people were paying attention to. Artificial intelligence (AI) had been...
View ArticleBrainchildren – Exploding robots and AI
I’ve recently been dipping into Brainchildren – essays on designing minds, by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. The essays in the book were written between the mid 1980s and 1998. There’s a whole...
View ArticleThe brain is (mostly) not a computer
I recently had my attention drawn to this essay from May 2016 – The Empty Brain – written by psychologist Robert Epstein (thanks Andrew). In it, Epstein argues that the dominant information processing...
View ArticleSmart metering – 1973 style
#OnThisDay 1973: “The entire cycle, from meter reading to final account, without the intervention of a single human” Michael Rodd cosplayed as some sort of Matrix meter reader, on Tomorrow’s World....
View ArticleRaspberry Pi 4B review
I’m now the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi 4B. Naturally, I wanted to see how it performed using the Whetstone double precision benchmark. In FORTRAN, obviously. Over ten runs it averaged a single...
View ArticleWorried About the Ethics of AI?
If you’re worried about the ethics of AI (artificial intelligence), you’re probably worried about the wrong thing. I explain why here … For example, are you aware how large the carbon footprint of...
View ArticleGovernment Gateway chronicles part 1: “Microsoft are our common enemy”
In business it’s been my experience that chance happenings, hard work and good luck lead to success more often than detailed strategic planning. This was definitely true when I found myself involved in...
View ArticleA Zambretti weather forecaster
When I was recovering from my stem cell transplant last year, I built a weather forecaster. It uses a Raspberry Pi, a BME280 sensor and a 20×4 character LCD screen. The forecasting algorithm I’d...
View ArticleDo robo-pets dream of electric sheep?
Philip K. Dick would be proud. Twenty robo-pets have been “installed” in Lancashire care homes. Definitely not AI, but an interesting use of robotics nonetheless. The council’s champion for older...
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