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
Narrative illusions
Our brain contains lots of neurons and can do great things. I can read, write and speak fluently in two languages made of tens of thousands of words. Millions of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Being shallow is rational
Pundits often lament who people have become shallow. They no longer sit down to read books cover from cover. Instead of writing thoughtful 2-page emails, they write...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Could virtual-reality make us smarter?
When the web initially took off, there were major concerns that it was “dumbing us down”. There are similar concerns with e-books making us dumber. I am quite sure...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Setting up a “robust” Minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi
My kids are gamers, and they love Minecraft. Minecraft sells its client software, but the server software is freely available. Since it is written in Java, it can...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What thirty years of technology looks like: the early high-school years
Thirty years ago, I was attending a high school. My oldest son is preparing to attend a similar high school. There was a meeting at my son’s future school, andContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Declarative programming is a dead-end for the lowly programmer
Most programmers focus on software execution. We want to understand what the computer is actually doing. Java, C, JavaScript, PHP, Python… all these languages make...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What the heck is interesting research?
I have long advocated that the world would be better off if more people did research. But what the heck is research? In simple terms, I know of two types of interesting...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Ranged random-number generation is slow in Python…
A colleague has been running simulations using a library written in Python. She has having serious performance problems… Her application is parallelizable, butContinue...
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