Category Archives: Philosophy

Thursday 10th December 2015

Santa in the Continuum

By Vic Grout

This year’s festive offering considers countable and non-countable infinities and follows (very) loosely from last year’s discussion of deterministic and non-determininstic optimisation

[Specially for Alex Irvine, who is either having trouble getting his head around infinite sets or still believes in Santa Claus: we’re not allowed to say which]

Father Christmas has a problem. The Intergalactic Department of Work and Pensions (IDWP) has threatened to cut his tax credits because he apparently only works one day a year. He’s tried to point out that he’s the head of a vast multinational organisation of elves and reindeer, who themselves work all year round, but that doesn’t wash with the IDWP boss, Ian ‘Dunkin’ Smiff, because his dad didn’t go to public school.

Planets

So, he’s been given extra work to do: a lot of extra work to do …

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2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Algorithms, Mathematics, Philosophy, Politics

Thursday 5th November 2015

‘Will the Robots Take Our Jobs?’ Isn’t Really the Important Question

By Vic Grout

Professor Stephen Hawking provoked considerable debate recently by suggesting that we could have more to fear from the nature of capitalism in future than armies of intelligent robots.  The response was immediate, robust, deeply personal and entirely predictable.

The basic premise of the discussion was Hawking noting that, if most of the work of a future society was performed by machines, then how we occupied ourselves instead was much more of a social, political, economic, ethical, demographic, etc. question than it was technological.  The rebuttal was essentially:

  1. That’s silly: the old jobs will be replaced by new ones,
  2. Please don’t say nasty things about capitalism,
  3. Scientists should stick to science.

Work3

So how much of this criticism was justified and how much of it was simply The Establishment closing ranks?

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8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Engineering, Hardware, Industry, Philosophy, Politics, Science

Wednesday 7th October 2015

Drop the Dead Donkey! (Is that really ‘News’?)

By Vic Grout

Most of us, watching TV from time-to-time, find ourselves saying, “Why’s that made the news? Surely there are more important stories?”  That may well be true so is there a logical way to approach the issue?

Let’s start with a couple of extreme examples, to try to get a feel for this:

  • On May 7th this year, the UK went to the polls to elect a new government.  Just about every news programme on radio and TV, as well as the whole Press, led with variants on the ‘story’ “Voters start voting in the General Election”.  But was this actually ‘news’?
  • At the other end of the scale, what about the dog that can play the piano? (Or any similar ‘and finally’ space-filler.) Is it worth the space?

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1 Comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Algorithms, Computing, Engineering, Philosophy, Politics

Wednesday 2nd September 2015

A Real “Marauder’s Map”?

By Vic Grout

This follows on from last month’s post, in which we discussed the possibility of a future Shazam for People service and extends it to the concept of a ‘universal tracking system’ or real-world Marauder’s Map …

MMOut

So, just how feasible is it?

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5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Algorithms, Computer Science, Computing, Hardware, Philosophy, Politics, Science, Software