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Tim-Berners Lee is often called the inventor of the world wide web because wrote the original proposal for the web and built the first web browser. But in recent years, he’s turned his attention to artificial intelligence.

In a new wide-ranging interview with Campaign Asia, Berners-Lee spoke about the turing test, Ex Machina, and why we should feel nervous about the future of AI.

The pace of AI research is accelerating, Berners-Lee says, but one problem is that lots of current work in the field is done by private companies, which don’t publish their findings. “Most of the work today is completely under wraps,” Berners-Lee said. “We don’t see what companies are working on. AI development is pretty secretive.”

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Here come the self drying jackets and self tying shoes! wink


The Athos Upper Body Package includes 14 built in sensors for real-time muscle and heart rate data. (credit: Athos)

Wearables will “disappear” in 2016, predicts New Enterprise Associates venture capital partner Rick Yang, cited in a Wednesday (Dec. 16) CNBC article — integrated “very directly into your everyday life, into your existing fashion sense to the extent that nobody knows you’re wearing a wearable,” he said.

For example, Athos makes smart workout clothes embedded with inconspicuous technology that tracks muscle groups, heart, and breathing rates, he noted.

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Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate legal practice within 15 years, perhaps leading to the “structural collapse” of law firms, a report predicting the shape of the legal market has envisaged.

Civilisation 2030: The near future for law firms, by Jomati Consultants, foresees a world in which population growth is actually slowing, with “peak humanity” occurring as early as 2055, and ageing populations bringing a growth in demand for legal work on issues affecting older people.

This could mean more advice needed by healthcare and specialist construction companies on the building and financing of hospitals, and on pension investment businesses, as well as financial and regulatory work around the demographic changes to come; more age-related litigation, IP battles between pharmaceutical companies, and around so-called “geriatric-tech” related IP.

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Sony is planning to commercialize lithium-sulfur batteries by 2020, and promising increases of up to 40% over conventional lithium-ion architectures. The devil is in the details, but a battery with 40% more specific energy at the same weight and cost as lithium-ion would enable EVs at lower price points.

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Are we evolving into new species with hybrid thinking interlinked into the Global Mind? At what point will the Web may become self-aware? Or is it already? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, how will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness?

In his book “The Global Brain” Howard Bloom argues that humans are a lot like neurons of the “global connectome”, and the coming Internet of Things (IoT) with trillions of sensors around the planet will become effectively the nervous system of Earth.

According to Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock, we have always been an integral part of this “Meta-Mind”, collective consciousness, global adaptive and self-regulating system while tapping into vast resources of information pooling and at the same time having a “shared hallucination”, we call reality.

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Don’t panic.

Unless the dolphins start leaving the planet.

At that point, by all mean panic.


If you saw a fireball streaking across the skies of Georgia and other parts of the Southeast Thursday night, you’re not alone. NASA confirmed meteor sightings near Atlanta and other parts of southern states. No, it’s not Doomsday, the end of the world, and it wasn’t a UFO or signs of extraterrestrial visitors.