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A freshly funded battery startup aims to ease the cobalt crunch
It's an often overlooked problem, but although electric vehicles produce zero emissions at point of use, and can be powered entirely with emission free fuel (e.g. renewable power sources), they still contain a lot of rare materials, often mined or produced under somewhat questionable ethical standards, so it's great to see how the world is…
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New AI method increases the power of artificial neural networks
Although i was aware of the benefits of sparsely connected neural networks, this paper outlines an additional, slightly counter-intuitive property – scale-freeness through a method they call "Sparse Evolutionary Training). Starting from a sparse network, the model randomly adds new connections and drops weaker ones, "evolving" in to a more model which is more complex…
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The Weird World of Thieves in Sweden
As Sweden turns to an increasingly cashless society, criminals are having to find other ways to line their pockets. Last year a high profile string of robberies of moving trucks of Apple merchandise (https://web.archive.org/web/20180604083500/http://digg.com/2017/sweden-truck-heist) were finally bought to an end by a police sting, but now criminals have started catching and selling endangered species –…
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Uber to invest €20 million in building flying taxis in France
Uber plans to launch a flying car service ("Uber Elevate"), predicting it'll be ready around 2025 – progress is being further accelerated by a $20M investment in a dedicated Research and Development site in Paris, Uber's first technology centre outside the US, focusing on research in to airspace management and overcoming the legal and practical…
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The paradox of automation and self driving cars
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Level 2 “self driving” cars are quite simply dangerous. The most recent incident (involving a Tesla model S which crashed in to a parked police car) has highlighted that partially automating the complex task of “driving” is potentially worse than not automating it at all (http://uk.businessinsider.com/teslas-autopilot-faces-scrutiny-after-accidents-2018-5). But the “paradox of…
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33 Industries Other Than Auto That Driverless Cars Could Turn Upside Down
The impact of self-driving cars will be felt far and wide. Aside from the obvious (insurance industry, petrol stations, professional drivers, crash repair centres), CB Insights points out that seemingly disconnected industries – like fast food, real estate, media and healthcare – are also set to be jolted from their comfort zones. Not all of…
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AI and Compute
"Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress" – with compute capacity used by AI doubling every 3.5 months for the last 16 years https://blog.openai.com/ai-and-compute/? https://blog.openai.com/ai-and-compute/ Since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s…
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How a Pioneer of Machine Learning Became One of Its Sharpest Critics
A future of truly intelligent machines requires causal reasoning, not simply "nontrivial curve fitting" (the probabilistic association of cause and effect), argues Judea Pearl. Development of true reasoning – why a given action has a certain outcome, not just that they're correlated – would allow machines to "ask counterfactual questions" – in effect, to predict…
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The Apple Watch has found a surprisingly useful home
Although Apple seems to be moving their focus for marketing the Watch towards health conscious consumers, there's a significant number of people who find wearing the device at work absolutely necessary to stay in touch. Many service industry workers are prohibited from checking phones during the workday or while on shift, but checking a watch…
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Instagram says ‘you’re all caught up’ in first time-well-spent feature
I have to admit – Instagram's switch from chronological to algorithmic content sequencing has left me feeling like i'm missing something if I stop browsing for a minute – but the main culprit for that is bad user interface design (the app instantly swings back to the top of the feed when it relaunches if…