I’m beginning a short series at Psychology Today about the ongoing advances being made in machine intelligence. I’d originally thought about using “The Ascent of Machine” for the series title — after Jacob Bronowski’s wonderful work, “The Ascent of Man”, which I found so inspiring when it first came out. […]
The closing plenary for the WorldFuture conference, held earlier this month in Vancouver, BC, was given by Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute. In his presentation, Frey offered up Eight Grand Challenges for humanity. It was a thought provoking presentation, though not without its critics. To recap, Frey stated that […]
Information. There is probably nothing so important to our lives, to our culture, to our world. Information, and the ability to communicate it, has been at the foundation of humanity’s rise since before we used fire or stone tools. It has allowed us to grow from nomadic clans to villages […]
Earlier this week, Charles Stross posted his thoughts on why he doesn’t think the Technological Singularity will happen. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the Technological Singularity is defined as that point in the future when a self-improving artificial general intelligence (AGI) achieves superintelligence. As Stross recommends, if you’re […]
Nine months ago, I wrote a post called “The Supercomputer Race” about China’s then top-ranked supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A and what it meant for the U.S. The Tianhe-1A achieved 2.57 petafolps (1015 floating point operations per second) on LINPACK, a benchmark based on a series of complex linear equations. In comparison, […]
Often when people think about intelligence and the future, they have visions of monolithic supercomputers, Terminator scenarios and Skynet. But there’s an entirely different path to future intelligence. Intelligence augmentation (IA, not to be confused with AI) involves supplementing our own brain’s abilities using a range of different technologies. While […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, I began blogging for Psychology Today earlier this month. My latest post there is “Vaccinations: The Intelligent Choice?”, which addresses some of the misconceptions and disinformation surrounding vaccine safety. I decided to write about this because the Washington State legislature is currently attempting […]
The last few years finally saw the arrival of supercomputers capable of petascale performance. In all, seven systems from the US, China, Japan and France achieved the milestone of processing a million billion floating point operations per second (flops) by the end of 2010. But even before this target was […]
I’m excited to announce I was recently invited to write a blog for Psychology Today. As with this blog, “The Intelligence Report” will explore the evolving relationship between intelligence and technology. It will include new posts as well as some cross-posting from this blog when the topic is a good […]
I consider myself a techno-optimist, but Watson’s performance in Jeopardy’s IBM Challenge has definitely exceeded my expectations. While I did predict Watson would win the competition, I didn’t think it would be so dominant. This was a contest I thought machine intelligence might win by a narrow margin, but the […]