Imagine you’re out in town one day. You feel free and anonymous, so when the opportunity arises and you have an illicit cigarette, pop into a sex shop or have coffee with an ex, you assume no-one will know. But with technology that already exists today, this basic right to keep your actions secret could be gone. Here’s how it will happen: Read more »
Before email, blogging and e-books, words were confined to the printed page. You would read the physical book in order from start to finish. But now we can now pull apart bodies of text, cross-reference them, share extracts, edit them and even plagiarize them, with unprecedented ease. With the advent of digital publishing we can analyze a body of text to see what words are used and how, using freely available online tools.
Have you ever found yourself using your computer and thinking “No! That’s not what I meant. Isn’t it obvious what I’m trying to do?”
Today you can use your computer for an ever-increasing number of activities – planning a holiday, reading the news, creating music, chatting, shopping, budgeting or just satisfying an idle curiosity.
But there is a problem; your computer is fundamentally stupid. You have to tell it exactly what you want. Often you have to enter information many times in different ways. The computer has no understanding of you as an individual, so it must ask for your address and billing information for every online purchase. It has no understanding of the context of your request, so it can’t know when you type “Java” into a search engine whether you are at that moment interested in the programming language, the island, or the coffee.
The only way for computers to get smarter at this is for them to learn more about you. Fortunately, a number of companies are now building software that shows that if you allow your computer to watch and learn from you, it can become far more helpful.
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With more and more things to remember every day, will we trust computers to back up our brains? Find out in this interview with Sunil Vemuri. (read more...)
Patents have spread from products to processes, algorithms and even genes. This documentary examines the dangers to society of patenting everything. (read more...)
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