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
Biology and computing are more alike than you think…
Biological systems are seemingly of infinite complexity. We still don’t know what a heart attack is, not really. Despite billions spent, we still don’t know what...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Artificial intelligence is mostly a matter of computational power?
Unless you live under a rock, you should know by now that AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence, has beaten a world champion at the game of Go. After Tic Tac Toe,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Web plasticity
When the Internet started out, people wanted to use it to chat and discuss. So we did as human beings had always done. We created tribes. In this manner, we got...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
It is easy to lose sight of why we do things…
I like to write and publish research papers. I think it can be tremendously useful. A research paper serves as a reference describing what was done and what was...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Statistics is overrated: the rise of data science
With the industrial and scientific revolutions, we saw the rise of enormous bureaucracies collecting reliable numbers. For the first time in history, we could ask...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My next bet: VR is going to take off in the next 3 years…
You have probably heard of virtual-reality (VR) headsets. Three of them are coming out this year: Facebook’s Occulus Rift, HTV Vive and the PlayStation VR. Moreover...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Lost my bet: the PC isn’t dead… yet
I can’t predict the future, nobody can… but I think betting on the future is a good intellectual workout. It forces you to think beyond your day-to-day activities...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Don’t beat them, make them irrelevant
Back in the early 2000s, I was a given an expert report that outlined the future of computing. Regarding software, the report foresaw the absolute and uncontested...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Things you have probably not seen coming…
The world changes but we often do not pay attention. Did you see these changes coming? Paper dictionaries being good as door stoppers and not much else. Major conservative...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Cultivating weirdness
The simplest and safest way to live your life is by cultivating “sameness”. Look around at what successful people do, and do the same thing. All your cool friends...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Beyond the PC toward virtual and augmented reality
PC sales have entered a slow decline. Today, you can literally work on your Microsoft Office documents no matter where you are, no matter what computing deviceContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Imagining the future trumps intelligence…
Whenever I meet young people, I alway stress how their future will be very different from the present. To anyone who lived through the first Great War (1914-1918)...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Default random-number generators are slow
Most languages like Java and Go, come with standard pseudo-random-number generators. Java uses a simple linear congruential generator. Starting with a seed value...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
More of Vinge’s “predictions” for 2025…
In my previous post, I reviewed some of the predictions made in the famous science-fiction book Rainbows end. The book was written in 2006 by Vernor Vinge and set...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Consciousness and free will are illusions: you are just a robot
As a computer scientist, it is natural for me to view the brain as a computer. And though computers have different abilities, they are also very much all equivalent...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Cray supercomputer, the iPhone and blood
When I was in high school, the most powerful computer money could buy was the Cray 2. The thing would require a room all by itself. I don’t know how much it sold...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Revisiting “Holy Fire” (Bruce Sterling, 1996)
Bruce Sterling in a famous scifi novelist. One of his most celebrated novels was written 20 years ago: Holy Fire. It is a near-future novel, set in the late XXIst...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pac-Man running at 1 million frames per second
In What does technology want?, Kevin Kelly argued that technology is on an evolutionary path. In some real sense, technology is alive and growing. It seeks outContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My most popular posts in 2015 (part II)
Techno-optimism For several years now, I have grown more optimistic about the power of human innovation. Despite the barrage of bad news, the fact is that we are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog