Category Archives: Engineering

Friday 20th September 2013

The Problem with ‘Futurology’

What’s your favourite terrible technological prediction? There are plenty to choose from, that’s for sure. The following is just a brief list of the most infamous computing-based futurology howlers (oldest to newest):

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, Thomas Watson: IBM chairman (1943) (* or was it someone else?)
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons”, Popular Mechanics (1949)
“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year”, Prentice Hall: Business Books Editor (1957)
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”, Ken Olsen: DEC founder (1977)
“640K ought to be enough for anybody”, Bill Gates (1981) (* or did he really?)
“We will never make a 32-bit operating system”, Bill Gates (1989)
“Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time”, Bill Gates (2004)
“Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput”, Alan Sugar (2005)

7 Comments | tags: Bertrand Russell, Bill Gates, Computing future, Fundamentalism, Futurology, Internet of Things, Intolerance, Michael Moorcock, Predicting the future, Privacy, Science fiction, StarTrek, The Singularity | posted in Academia, Computer Science, Computing, Education, Engineering, Hardware, Philosophy, Politics, Science

Saturday 4th May 2013

The ‘Real’ Internet of Things

By Vic Grout

(This post is derived from a talk given at the 2012 Wrexham Science Festival.)

There are so many different ways of describing the Internet of Things. On the one hand, maybe it’s what the original Internet was always destined to be; on the other, it’s about as boring as it gets. Tag just about anything and everything we can stick a label on, let them talk to each other, then turn the existing Internet into a massive database of things that can be referenced, interconnected and used any which way we like. Great if you really need your fridge to reorder the milk for you or the plants to water themselves but hardly inspirational. Two features, however, give the proposed (and not yet fully considered) IoT a serious ‘Oooh!’ factor …

Firstly, the ever-increasing intelligence of the Internet will allow us to manipulate this data in new and exciting ways. More and more, the evolving Semantic Web will be able to understand the information it’s working with and make the best use of it for our benefit. Our personal and working lives are about to become completely automated and made easier by web intelligence. Secondly, and potentially on the darker side, other hardware and software developments will extend the IoT’s reach. Face-recognition, image-scanners and numerous other advanced detectors and sensors will soon mean that everything can be read, whether it’s deliberately labelled or not. We, and everything we use or own, may soon become part of the Real Internet of Things (RIoT) and we might have to expect to be identified and traced in everything we do. So what will the future will look like? Are we heading for paradise or Big Brother? Continue reading

7 Comments | tags: 2012 Wrexham Science Festival, EASYLINE, Internet of Things, IoT, Machine to Machine, Personal data, Privacy, Radio-frequency identification, Real Internet of Things, RFID, RIoT, Semantic Web, Smarter Planet | posted in Computer Science, Computing, Engineering, Philosophy, Politics, Science

Saturday 20th April 2013

Dawn of the Intelligent Machines?

By Vic Grout

(The second of two posts distilled from a talk given at the 2011 Wrexham Science Festival. The first part, ‘The Singularity is Coming … Or Is It?‘, appears separately. However, both have a common thread and share some material.)

It seems that the next few decades may give us something really remarkable: truly intelligent computers; that, before the 21st century is a half, maybe a third, old, we could be living with machines capable of genuine, independent thought. Apparently, this is not science fiction or the ‘artificial intelligence’ of the 20th century but real intelligence. So many questions … Can that really happen? Will it? How? What does it mean? What will that world be like? What do we have to look forward to? Or to fear? How do we get from here to there … and do we want to? How does today’s AI technology develop into tomorrow’s thinking machine? What will we do with it when we’ve got it? What happens if we get it wrong? Can we ultimately build something ‘better’ than us? Will we be served by teams of intelligent robots or is there a risk that we could end up serving them? Or, as we and the machines both evolve, will the ‘natural’ distinction between human and computer eventually become blurred and ultimately unimportant? Pause for breath … Continue reading

21 Comments | tags: 2011 Wrexham Science Festival, Artificial intelligence, Future, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Ray Kurzweil, Singularity, Technological singularity, Transhumanism | posted in Computer Science, Computing, Engineering, Philosophy, Science

Monday 15th April 2013

‘The Singularity’ is Coming … Or is it?

By Vic Grout

(The first of two posts distilled from a talk given at the 2011 Wrexham Science Festival. The second part, ‘Dawn of the Intelligent Machines?, appears separately. However, both have a common thread and share some material.)

It’s sometimes said in the media and entertainment world that you haven’t made it until you’ve been ridiculed on South Park. The technological equivalent is probably that a concept isn’t mainstream until it’s featured in Dilbert. If that’s the case, then ‘the singularity’ has passed a necessary (if not sufficient) condition. But does that make it any more real? Continue reading

1 Comment | tags: Future, Paul Allen, Ray Kurzweil, Science fiction, Singularity, Technological singularity, Vernor Vinge | posted in Computer Science, Computing, Engineering, Philosophy, Science