Computing
Latest significant advancements in computing. Reporting on the far-reaching impacts of improvements within the realm of computing on society and humanity.
How Robots Are Getting Better at Making Sense of the World
The multiverse of science fiction is populated by robots that are indistinguishable from humans. They are usually smarter, faster, and stronger than us. They seem capable of doing any job imaginable, from piloting a...
Teaching Machines to Understand, and Summarize, Text
We humans are swamped with text. It’s not just news and other timely information: Regular people are drowning in legal documents. The problem is so bad we mostly ignore it. Every time a person...
Machine Reasoning Gets a Boost With This Simple New Algorithm
There’s a classic scene in almost every police procedural: a weathered detective stands staring at a collection of photos pinned to a wall. Thin, red yarn traces the connections between the different players. Something’s...
Ray Kurzweil: Our Brain Is a Blueprint for the Master Algorithm
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, thinker, and futurist famous for forecasting the pace of technology and predicting the world of tomorrow. In this video, Kurzweil suggests the blueprint for the master algorithm—or a single,...
6 Things Quantum Computers Will Be Incredibly Useful For
Computers don’t exist in a vacuum. They serve to solve problems, and the type of problems they can solve are influenced by their hardware. Graphics processors are specialized for rendering images; artificial intelligence processors...
Is There a Multidimensional Mathematical World Hidden in the Brain’s Computation?
Two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks looked into the night sky and saw geometric shapes emerge among the stars: a hunter, a lion, a water vase.
In a way, they used these constellations to...
Deep Learning at the Speed of Light on Nanophotonic Chips
Deep learning has transformed the field of artificial intelligence, but the limitations of conventional computer hardware are already hindering progress. Researchers at MIT think their new “nanophotonic” processor could be the answer by carrying...
Why Interstellar Travel Will Be Possible Sooner Than You Think
The term “moonshot” is sometimes invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the first human on the...
Forget Police Sketches: Researchers Perfectly Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves
Picture this: you’re sitting in a police interrogation room, struggling to describe the face of a criminal to a sketch artist. You pause, wrinkling your brow, trying to remember the distance between his eyes...
Quantum Computers Will Analyze Every Financial Model at Once
In the movie Office Space, Peter Gibbons has a stroke of genius. Confronted with the utter mundanity of a life slaving away at his office park software company, he convinces his friends to make...
7 Big Tech Trends That Are Changing the Way We Make Things
Manufacturing is dirty, dull, and outmoded. It’s a slow-moving industry stuck in the past as new technologies out of Silicon Valley threaten to upend it. Stereotypes are fun, and misleading.
Let’s not forget manufacturing is...
How to Build a Mind? This Theory May Guide Us Toward an Answer
How do intelligent minds learn?
Consider a toddler navigating her day, bombarded by a kaleidoscope of experiences. How does her mind discover what’s normal happenstance and begin building a model of the world? How does...
The Next Great Computer Interface Is Emerging—But It Doesn’t Have a Name Yet
Not long ago, your parents might’ve noticed a kid staring at a smartphone in their front yard. There wasn’t anything there. The kid was just…hanging out. What they didn’t know? Said kid was gazing...
Quantum Computing Demands a Whole New Kind of Programmer
Quantum computers finally seem to be coming of age with promises of “quantum supremacy” by the end of the year. But there’s a problem—very few people know how to work them.
The bold claim of achieving...
Cybersecurity Pros Will Soon Patrol Computer Networks Like Agents in ‘The Matrix’
Security analysts could soon become the first employees asked to show up to work inside virtual reality.
Thanks to a new virtual reality tool built by the Colorado-based startup ProtectWise, cybersecurity professionals may soon be...
Google Says Machine Learning Chips Make AI Faster and More Efficient
Google recently bared the inner workings of its dedicated machine learning chip, the TPU, marking the latest skirmish in the arms race for AI hardware supremacy.
Shorthand for Tensor Processing Unit, the chip has been...
Quantum Cryptography Is Unbreakable. So Is Human Ingenuity
Two basic types of encryption schemes are used on the internet today. One, known as symmetric-key cryptography, follows the same pattern that people have been using to send secret messages for thousands of years....
Ghost in the Shell Thrills, But Ducks the Philosophical Questions Posed by a Cyborg Future
How closely will we live with the technology we use in the future? How will it change us? And how close is “close”? Ghost in the Shell imagines a futuristic, hi-tech but grimy and...
This Is What Makes Quantum Computers Powerful Problem Solvers
In a previous article, I introduced the recent open-sourcing of quantum computing software by DWave. DWave is the maker of a quantum computer being used and studied by a number of groups, including NASA...
The Weird World of Cyborg Animals Is Here
Roboticists frequently turn to nature for inspiration for their inventions, reverse engineering the traits that evolution has developed over millennia. Others are taking a shortcut by simply integrating modern technology with living animals.
The idea...
Is the Brain More Powerful Than We Thought? Here Comes the Science
If you’ve ever played around with an old music amplifier, you probably know what a firing neuron sounds like.
A sudden burst of static? Check. A rapid string of pops, like hundreds of bursting balloons?...
New Artificial Synapse Bridges the Gap to Brain-Like Computers
From AlphaGo’s historic victory against world champion Lee Sedol to DeepStack’s sweeping win against professional poker players, artificial intelligence is clearly on a roll.
Part of the momentum comes from breakthroughs in artificial neural networks,...
Are We Ready for Cyborgs? The Tech Is on Its Way
Are we ready for cyborgs? More specifically, people with implants that enhance beyond the superficially cosmetic and into the realms of evolved beings?
Jorge Pelegrín-Borondo (Universidad de La Rioja), Eva Reinares-Lara (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos)...
Why the Potential of Augmented Reality Is Greater Than You Think
Never before have businesses been able to build billion-dollar valuations in so little time. Never before have incumbent enterprises been able to go out of business so quickly. Disruption is now commonplace, and augmented...
Hacking Our Smart Devices Is Way Too Easy—Here’s How to Fix That
Smart-television maker Vizio agreed to pay a penalty this month for spying on 11 million customers. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the company captured second-by-second information on what customers viewed, combined it with their gender, age...
Financial Leaders: Make Your Mark on the Future at Exponential Finance
From digital currency to machine learning, the financial industry is being rocked by exponential technologies. Blockchain, artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, quantum computing, crowdfunding, and computing systems are allowing startups to solve consumer needs...
Holograms Aren’t The Stuff of Science Fiction Anymore
The world seems to be full of illusions—and we’re not talking about fake news from Macedonia.
Holograms appear to be all around us now. Long-dead rapper Tupac Shakur showed up at the 2012 edition of...
Physicists Unveil Blueprint for a Quantum Computer the Size of a Soccer Field
Quantum computers promise to crack some of the world’s most intractable problems by super-charging processing power. But the technical challenges involved in building these machines mean they’ve still achieved just a fraction of what...
When Electronic Witnesses Are Everywhere, No Secret’s Safe
On November 22, 2015, Victor Collins was found dead in the hot tub of his co-worker, James Andrew Bates. In the investigation that followed, Bates pleaded innocent but in February was charged with first-degree...
Quantum Computing Progress Will Speed Up Thanks to Open Sourcing
In the quest for ever more powerful computers, researchers are beginning to build quantum computers—machines that exploit the strange properties of physics on the smallest of scales.
The field has been making progress in recent...
Machines Won’t Replace Us—We’ll Become Their Mentors
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” –John Culkin (based on Marshall McLuhan’s ideas)
Something big is happening in design and engineering.
For all of human history, we...
This Amazing Video Shows Just How Much Software Has Eaten the World
Software is a relatively recent invention in human history, but few things have had as much of an impact on the modern world. Things which used to be physical stuff are increasingly melting away...
The Technologies We’re Most Fired Up to Watch in 2017
Covering technology is exhilarating.
Each year is filled with unforeseen surprises—advances we thought were years away, unexpected technology applications (like AI used for mental healthcare), and unlikely startups reimagining entire markets.
These breakthroughs keep Singularity Hub's...
Why the Latest AI Wave Will Gain Momentum in the Coming Year
It can read lips and create new food recipes. It can win at chess, Jeopardy and the game Go. Every major technology company appears to be integrating it into how they organize and operate...
Evolution’s Brutally Simple Rules Can Make Machines More Creative
Despite nature’s bewildering complexity, the driving force behind it is incredibly simple. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is an uncomplicated but brutally effective optimization strategy that has allowed life to solve complex problems, like vision...
New Brain-Like Chip Uses Light to Go Blazingly Fast
Deep learning is having a serious moment right now in the world of AI.
And for good reason. Loosely based on the brain’s computing architecture, artificial neural networks have vastly outperformed their predecessors in a...
Why the US Is Losing Ground on the Next Generation of Powerful Supercomputers
“I feel the need — the need for speed.”
The tagline from the 1980s movie Top Gun could be seen as the mantra for the high-performance computing system world these days. The next milestone in the endless...
Quantum Computers Could Crush Today’s Top Encryption in 15 Years
Quantum computers could bring about a quantum leap in processing power, with countless benefits for fields like data science and AI. But there’s also a dark side: this extra power will make it simple...
The Race to Wrap the Earth in Internet Is Heating Up
How important is the internet to your day-to-day life?
For starters, you’re definitely reading this on a screen and using the internet to access it. That means you probably use the internet to access most...
Welcome to the New Era of Easy Media Manipulation
Have you noticed how bizarre social media and the news cycle has been lately?
In the age of digital media, journalism is changing significantly. Widely available storytelling and distribution tools, misinformation spreading like wildfire, social...
Battle of the Bots: How AI Is Taking Over the World of Cybersecurity
Google has built machine learning systems that can create their own cryptographic algorithms — the latest success for AI’s use in cybersecurity. But what are the implications of our digital security increasingly being handed...
When the Mother of Invention Is a Machine, Who Gets Credit?
What do the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush, about a thousand musical compositions and even a few recent food recipes all have in common?
They were invented by computers, but you won’t find a nonhuman credited with...
Google’s New AI Gets Smarter Thanks to a Working Memory
“The behavior of the computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing and his 'state of mind' at that moment.” – Alan Turing
Artificial intelligence has a memory problem.
Back in...
Why the World Is Better Than Ever—and Will Get Better Still
If you read or watch the news, you’ll likely think the world is falling to pieces. Trends like terrorism, climate change, and a growing population straining the planet’s finite resources can easily lead you...
Medicine Will Advance More in the Next 10 Years Than It Did in the Last 100
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, recently announced a $3 billion effort to cure all disease during the lifetime of their daughter, Max. Earlier this year, Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker donated $250...
The AI Conversation Has Exploded This Decade With Big Advances
Discussion of artificial intelligence has skyrocketed since the end of the last decade, according to a new analysis looking at public perception of the technology.
The paper by Stanford computer science PhD Ethan Fast and...
The Astonishing Healthcare Tech of the Future Is Arriving
This week in San Diego, Singularity University hosted its annual Exponential Medicine conference. The conference aims to connect the dots between healthcare disciplines and cutting-edge tech by convening medical practitioners, technologists, entrepreneurs, and over...
Health Devices Are All Too Hackable—Here’s What You Need to Know
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to bring nearly fifty billion new devices online by 2020. This sounds great, until you read that an estimated 70% of IoT devices are hackable.
That cute Google Nest...
The Future of Surgery Is Robotic, Data-Driven, and Artificially Intelligent
As far back as 3,500 years ago ancient Egyptian doctors were performing invasive surgeries. Even though our tools and knowledge have improved drastically over time, until very recently surgery was still a manual task...
Massive Disruption Is Coming With Quantum Computing
Next year, we may see the launch of the first true quantum computers.
The implications will be staggering.
This post aims to answer three questions:
What are quantum computers?
What are their implications?
Who’s working on...
