Last week I was on the In The Abstract podcast. I came up with a curious idea. If I were Tom Scott, I'd turn this into a performance piece - instead, here's a short and entirely fictional story. Facebook knew you were in love a long time before you did. It noticed you scrolling back through her timeline. Every millisecond lingering over the photos of her at the beach was faithfully logged. When she sent a message to her best friend saying "Hot date tonight ;-)" it correlated all the…
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Scene: An airport. A few years from now. "I'm sorry sir, we can't let you on the flight until you visit the rest-room." I'll admit that it caught me off-guard. Surely the woman at the airline gate was joking? "Sir, two of the plane's toilets are out-of-order. At this time we're requesting all passengers void themselves before entry." "Look, I'm a grown man. I've been responsible for my own piss for several years now. Pretty sure I'll be fine." She gave me a sceptical look and prodded her…
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Last week I attended a talk by Dr Irina Higgins from Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind. It was a fascinating look at how their AI works, and how it is trained. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you've ever played a video game online, it is likely you've been training an Artificial Intelligence agent without realising it.Ethical?❤️ 7💬 4♻️ 020:06 - Thu 09 March 2017 Part of the problem is that AI is usually trained on massive datasets, over millions of hours. So it is hard to know exac…
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I have been receiving letters from a dear friend by the name of Ophiuchus. He has been researching some curious anomalies in the Unicode Standard. While I cannot vouch for all he has written, I thought it worth presenting his discoveries to you. My friend, I bring you a curiosity! I have been engaged in a most frustrating task. That is, trying to decipher the ancient history of our friends at The Consortium. They have refused me access to their archives, but I have bribed a friendly…
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David Bowie invented the NFT in 1997. The "Bowie Bond" allowed you to directly invest in an artist's catalogue and receive royalty payments based on their sales. Here's how it worked: You pay money to the artist (Bowie) Artist uses that money to buy the rights to their back catalogue Every time one of the songs from that catalogue is sold, or played on the radio, the artist gets paid Investors receive a share of that payment It's a primitive "smart" contract. Money flows back to the…
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(I *sure* this was the basis a short story I read - but I can't find it. So I'm (re)writing it. If you know of the original, please let me know…!) The speed of light is a universal constant. This "speed limit" is fundamental to everything we understand about physics. Information - when propagated via the electromagnetic spectrum - cannot travel faster than 0.3 Gigametres per second. There is no argument here. Every experiment conducted by our top scientists has confirmed it. There are no "warp …
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As the global demand for safer cars grew, there was a drive for cheaper and more accurate ways to deploy airbags. Thus, car manufacturers turned to MEMS based accelerometers and gyroscopes. Small, accurate, and fast. With increased production, comes increased manufacturing efficiency. So these sensors also became cheap to purchase for everyone. The street finds its own uses for things. In this case, phone manufacturers looking to differentiate their products started adding gyroscopes. Now…
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This is a short piece of mostly fiction. It looks at the secret life of data and algorithms. Enjoy! Data Becomes Her I never knew my mother. OK, no one ever really knows their mum. But I never even got to meet mine. She made it clear at the hospital that she'd smother me to death if she was ever left alone with a mewling baby. Looking back, I think I might have preferred that fate. I never tried contacting her in my teens - even when things got really bad. I sometimes typed her name into…
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The Yamaguchi Foodstuffs Conglomerate emphatically denies causing tumours in vegetables. They did not "give a beansprout cancer". That would be irresponsible and against their 250 year commitment to responsible bio-agriculture development. Every culture has their own version of Grimm's "Der süße Brei". A cautionary tale of a magic porridge dispenser which, thanks to one woman's forgetfulness, engulfs the entire village with an endless supply of food. The Dutch warn their children about the d…
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Every year since 2009, I've taken part in NaBloPoMo - National Blog Posting Month. The aim is to publish a new blog post every day in November. In the last few years, I've blogged pretty much constantly - daily for 2020, 2021, and 2023. A total of around 2,800 posts. But now it is time for a new challenge - NaNoWriMo. Where I - and thousands of other plucky souls - try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. And so, every day I shall attempt to publish a freshly written short story for my…
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Welcome to NaNoWriMo, where I - and thousands of other plucky souls - try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. You are reading "Tales of the Algorithm". A compendium of near-future sci-fi stories. Each chapter is a stand-alone adventure set a few days from now. Everything you read is possible - there's no magic, just sufficiently advanced technology. Think of them as technological campfire horror stories. Your feedback on each story is very much appreciated. And so, let's crack on…
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