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
Usury and the collapse of empires
The American government recently played Russian roulette with its economy by threatening to default on its debt. Of course, nobody actually thought that the Americans...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pick one: determinism or fairness
Computers changed our life drastically in the last few decades. Correspondingly, I view the world in terms of algorithms. When I think of how the government works...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Scientists are communists
Overconfident individuals often win by claiming more resources than they could defend (Johnson and Fowler). If nobody knows who is strongest, whoever thinks he...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What the Internet wants me to read (summer 2011)
Last week, I asked on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus what I should read over the summer. Here is a quick summary of the recommendations I got: On Twitter: A...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Sentience is indescribable
Arguably, one of the most nagging scientific question is the nature of sentience. Can we build sentient computers? Is my cat sentient? What does that mean? Will...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The myth of the unavoidable specialization
In a recent essay, Malone et al. claimed that we were entering the age of hyperspecialization. Their core assumption: human beings are more efficient when doing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On being happy
What if you could engineer happiness? What if you could redesign your life so that you are happier? With professors in mind, Brian Martin wrote an essay entitled...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Probabilities are unnecessary mathematical artifacts
There has been much philosophical debate about randomness. While people often offer the nature of consciousness as a fundamental unresolved question, we should...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The language interpreters are the new machines
Most Computer Science textbooks assume that algorithms are written directly into machine language for an idealized machine under a Von Neumann architecture. Alas...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is Wikipedia anti-intellectual?
Sander recently posted a provocative piece where he argues that geeks suffer from anti-intellectualism. To some extend, his stance is that democratic sites such...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why I still program
People expect that, as you grow older, you give up practical jobs such as programming for more noble tasks such as managing a team and acquiring funding. This especially...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Automation will make you obsolete, no matter who you are
I was part of the first generation of kids to receive computers as gifts. I was also part of the first generation of professionals to adopt computer-assisted tele...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The perils of filter-then-publish
Why do I prefer the publish-then-filter system, which dominates social media such as blogs, to the traditional filter-then-publish system used by scientific journals...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You cannot refuse to publish our paper because
I feel strongly that the convention peer review process needs to evolve to a publish-then-filter model. That is, I do not believe that a few select individuals...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Time-saving versus work-inducing software
At a glance, office software like Word, PowerPoint or Excel, are great time savers. Nobody would want to go back to the era before Word Processors? Unfortunately...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Scaling MongoDB
I have been spending much time thinking about a future where document-oriented databases are the default. Though they have their problems, I think that they are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Improve your impact with abundance-based design
People design all the time: new cars, new software, new houses. All design is guided by constraints (cost, time, materials, space) and by objectives (elegance,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is science more art or industry?
In my previous post, I argued that people who pursue double-blind peer review have an idealized “LEGO block” view of scientific research. Research papers are “pure”...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Case Against Double-blind Peer Review
Many scientific journals use double-blind peer review. That is, the authors submit their work in a way that cannot be traced back to them. Meanwhile, the authors...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog