Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going…
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Twenty five years ago today, the EU's IST advisory group published a paper about the future of "Ambient Intelligence". Way before the world got distracted with cryptoscams and AI slop, we genuinely thought that computers would be so pervasive and well-integrated that the dream of "Ubiquitous Computing" would become a reality. The ISTAG published an optimistic paper called "Scenarios for ambient…
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Many years ago - when I was very young and you were even younger - it was standard for an ISP to provide all their users with a small amount of webspace. Both Pipex and Demon offered webspace back in 1996. If my hazy memory is correct, they offered a few megabytes - more than enough for a fledgeling website. But, over the years, ISPs shut down their bundled web offerings. Even their bundled…
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There are a few heartstopping moments when you have to transfer a Very Large Amount of Money. Will the bank deny the transaction? Will I have to remember my mother's cousin's dog's maiden name? Will the money arrive safely? I clicked the "Transfer Your Life Savings" button on the website. An hourglass appeared. I flipped into the other tab and hit refresh. My balance went from zero to…
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Only fools try to predict the future. You can read my predictions for 2023, or dig deep into my archives and rate me on how foolish I am. So here are my five predictions for 2024 AI Genocide It is obvious that Large Language Models are based on stolen material. I suspect that a lawsuit will determine that at least one of the major players has to delete all copies of their AI. They will refuse …
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A few years ago, I got rid of all my paper books and switched exclusively to eBooks. Whenever I tell bibliophiles this, they usually shriek in horror. What about the smell of books?!!? What about showing off your bookcases to impress people!?!? What about your signed first editions!??!?! But the other day I had someone scoff at me and say "Good luck reading when civilisation collapses! I'll…
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I bloody hate this cartoon that's doing the rounds (I think it's by the incredibly talented Len in Private Eye). Here's what I want the caption to say: OK, one more time: Get here at least 30 minutes early because the queue barely moves and you'll inevitably be stuck behind someone trying to pay for their season ticket using pre-decimal coins. The person behind the counter either won't…
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This is a difficult and disturbing book. It is a great read for any hacker - it's all about the way technology abuses people and how it radicalises people into fighting back. The dialogue is Socratic and the stories are a set of parables. The first asks us to consider what are the limits of protecting people? When we try to restrict technology "for your own good" it often has a degrading and…
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When I was a kid, I "invented" a brilliant new compression format. Rather than sending a digital image of, say, the Mona Lisa a user could just send the ASCII characters "Mona Lisa". The receiving computer could look up the full image in its memory-banks and reproduce the work of art on screen. Genius! Of course, it relies on the receiver have a copy of every single image in existence, but…
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I read an interesting discussion the other day about why humans (mostly) don't eat carnivorous mammals. It boiled down to a few main points: Carnivores often don't taste good due to their relative lack of fat and stringy muscles. Aggressive animals are hard to domesticate. What do you feed them? 1 and 2 are manageable. A few centuries of selective breeding and I'm sure you'll have a…
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Only fools try to predict the future. You can read my earlier predictions, or dig deep into my archives and rate me on how foolish I am. I tend to look at technology through the lens of "what do I want to happen?" and then assume the worst. So, here goes! Federation Gets Simpler As I wrote about in The Social Pendulum we see a swing to extremes of culture. We've had a decade-or-so of big…
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Amazon Alexa is losing billions of dollars. Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars. The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars. Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress? I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the …
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