Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Betting against techno-unemployment
There are millions of truck drivers in the US today. In particular, there are about 1.7 million tractor-trailer (human) drivers. There are many more professional...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Can your C compiler vectorize a scalar product?
If you have spent any time at all on college-level mathematics, you have probably heard of the scalar product: float scalarproduct(float * array1, float * array2...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The threat of technological unemployment
There is a widely reported threat to our economy: robots are going to replace human workers. It is nothing new… In 1930, Keynes, the famous economist introduced...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Don’t let the experts define science!
We know more than we can tell. We all know what a democracy is… We know that France, Canada, the USA, Japan… are democracies… Russia and China are not democracies...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Performance overhead when calling assembly from Go
The Go language allows you to call C functions and to rewrite entire functions in assembly. As I have previously documented, calling C functions from Go comes with...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What is a useful theory?
I was an adept, as a teenager and a young adult, of thinkism. Thinkism is the idea that intelligence alone can solve problems. I thought I was smart so I couldContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and technology: what happened in 2016
This year, you are able to buy CRISPR-based CRISPR gene editing toolkits for $150 on the Internet as well as autonomous drones, and you can ask your Amazon Echo...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How to build robust systems
Millions of little things go wrong in your body every minute. Your brain processes the data in a noisy manner. Even trained mathematicians can’t think logically...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Don’t assume that safety comes for free: a Swift case study
Most modern languages try to be “safer” by checking runtime values in the hope of producing more secure and less buggy software. Sadly, it makes it harder to reason...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Getting a job in the software industry
I am routinely asked about how to break into the software industry as a programmer. It is true that there is high demand for qualified programmers, but not allContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Software evolves by natural selection
Software evolves by natural selection, not by intelligent design. It is a massive trial-and-error process. There are many thousands of programmers working every...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On metadata
I remember a time, before the Web, when you would look for relevant academic papers by reading large books with tiny fonts that would list all relevant work inContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Framed in the past
We can’t predict the future. However, I still read futurologists like Calum Chace, Alvin Toffler, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Joël de Rosnay and so forth. A good...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My review of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (video game)
The Deus Ex series is set in a dystopian futuristic universe. (It reminds me a bit of Japan’s Ghost in the Shell.) The latest game in the series (Deux Ex: Mankind...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Who is keeping an eye on the tech companies?
A corporation such as Spotify was founded a few years ago by a 23-year-old man, and it now plays a key role in the music industry. YouTube is now the big-boss of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Update to my VR bet with Greg Linden
I have an ongoing bet with Greg Linden stating that we are going to sell 10 million virtual-reality (VR) units per year by 2019. I have been paying close attention...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Intel will add deep-learning instructions to its processors
Some of the latest Intel processors support the AVX-512 family of vector instructions. These instructions operate on blocks of 512 bits (or 64 bytes). The benefit...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A case study in the performance cost of abstraction (C++’s std::shuffle)
Statisticians and machine-learning experts sometimes need to shuffle data quickly. There is one standard and simple algorithm to shuffle an array, the so-called...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Variable-length strings can be expensive
Much of our software deals with variable-length strings. For example, my name “Daniel” uses six characters whereas my neighbor’s name (“Philippe”) uses 8 characters...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog