So, what do I think of Apple’s Time Flies event today? For starters, I appreciate this more egalitarian approach to Apple events, where everyone gets to watch the live stream at the same time regardless of their station in society. I also love the idea of not trekking down to Cupertino early in the morning. … Continue reading Apple Watch’s Sensory Overload
As a fan of photography in general, and a believer in the inevitability of computational photography and its capabilities, today is indeed a red-letter day. Apple has truly delivered a great new camera, one that happens to be a phone and a whole lot of other things. From great stills to slow-motion selfies to incredible … Continue reading How long will Apple’s mad science edge last?
I was reading a blog post, and this tiny bit stood out:
Kaushik Roy of Purdue University compared the power consumption of Deep Blue for chess (15kW), Watson for Jeopardy (200kW), and AlphaGo for Go (300kW) to show that matching human behavior in games does not come easy.
It would be interesting to see how the rise of AI/ML will impact the energy consumption at data centers and in general. I wonder if we are all thinking about the power needs of software-driven, silicon-optimized future deeply enough. Steve says that human brain needs about 20 watts of energy and it uses an interesting cooling system. It is also a good reason why we need to take breaks from activities — social media in specific — which cause us to use up too much energy.
Most of us often fear what we can’t see, understand or contextualize. The unknown is the biggest devil of them all. Throughout history we have had to contend with this — solar eclipses, epileptic fits and falling asteroids — they all became part of the fictional fear factor, that has plagued humanity. And perhaps that explains why it became fashionable to pontificate about our dystopian future. Rapid and whiplash-inducing changes in technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and bio-engineering have got dystopia on our minds. Continue reading “Our Dystopian Now”
“There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks,” writes ProPublica, in first part of its series, Machine Bias. [ProPublica]
