In his (very, very long) book 'The Rise and Fall of American Growth' (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0691147728), Robert Gordon lays out an argument that not only is growth slower than than people think, but that the growth spurt from 1870 to 1970 was, by all accounts, a one-off, and growth today is reverting back to the long term…

Using technology for good – in this case to reduce the amount of pesticide and the cost of seed-stock (you no longer need to buy the special seed which is only available, at a premium, from the manufacturer of the herbicide or pesticide you plan to use) – is what many of us enter the…

What happens when the network for your IOT or connected devices suddenly announces it's going to make a change which affects millions of devices at your end customers? How do you convince them to upgrade to a product which is essentially the same as the one they currently have without seeming like you're trying to…

Probabilistic models of natural language processing don’t seem that revolutionary – after all, humans implicitly work this way – but building a practical but generic framework has been a challenge for engineers and researchers for years (we only have to look at the Alexa Prize (https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize) to see how hard this issue is). Gamalon’s new…

Technology can help or hinder. There's a growing evidence base indicating that overprotective parenting is leading to decreased ability for young adults to manage risk or respond to uncertainty in an inherently chaotic and increasingly fast paced world (and as a result, the pushback against protective playgrounds which sanitise  risk is also growing e.g. https://rethinkingchildhood.com/2018/04/19/risk-dangerous-playwork-adventure-conventional-playground/), so…

I find my Amazon Echo devices useful in a range of situations – getting travel and weather information quickly while i'm trying to get the kids out the door, converting units or setting timers while i'm cooking, playing music while i get on with tasks, even controlling the lights and heating – but i've also…

I've always found IntelliSense to be amazingly useful, and i miss it when i have to use an IDE or language which doesn't include it, so these AI-based improvements look like they'll only improve things. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2018/05/07/introducing-visual-studio-intellicode The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Waymo (Google/Alphabet) is finally launching fully automated vehicles. 52 cars will be deployed around their Mountain View offices and will only be able to operate in and arouund that area. Of note however is a second applicant – China's JingChi which has requested a licence for a single car with a remote person overseeing the…

Recordings of calls between Google Duplex and a hairdresser and restaurant are amazing. The AI interacts just like a human – adding ums and hesitation, and even successfully recovering the conversation when the restaurant staff misunderstood the request. I think this is what most people think of when they imagine a virtual, digital assistant, and…

The most likely reason Uber’s self driving car killed a pedestrian is because of settings designed to increase passenger comfort. While I’m sure Uber would agree that in this case they went too far, it reminds us that autonomous vehicles (and robots in general) live only to the moral code we provide them. An interesting…