Artificial Intelligence

My wife and I have been downsizing and ridding ourselves of over 40 years of furniture collecting as we prepare to move to our new apartment in downtown Toronto. IKEA, the assemble-it-yourself furniture store, has figured largely in our lives in the last few months as we replace the o

Every year the MIT Technology Review picks the ten technologies that represent significant breakthroughs.  Past years have included crowdfunding in 2012, gestural interfaces to computers in 2011, engineered stem cells in 2010 and low cost DNA sequencing in 2009, just to name a few. Wh

Technology played a critical role in the news events of this week beginning with the crudely-fashioned, low tech, pressure-cooker bombs planted at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and the mayhem and death they wrought, followed by the technology of our communication age uncoveri

A company in Canada, D-Wave Systems, is making some of the big industry players sit up and take notice. Back in November of last year I wrote about D-Wave’s Vesuvius 512-qubit processor and how early adopters were purchasing the technology to do complex problem solving.  One of

iRobot, developers of military robots and the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, have been building robots for more than 23 years. In 2012 they reported having sold 8 million home robots and more than 5,000 iRobot unmanned ground vehicles worldwide. For all of these robotic devices iRobot h

Dmitry Itskov is a Russian entrepreneur and founder of the 2045 Initiative with a goal to reinvent humanity to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Last July I reported on this as an initiative of billionaires. At the time membership was around 10,000. Today it has more than doubl

I recently finished reading David J. Gunkel’s book of the same name in which the author challenges the reader to understand the philosophical questions related to our perspective on artificial intelligence (AI) and machines in the 21st century. The HAL computer of Arthur C. Clar

In a recent article I asked the question has NASA lost its bearings? Well in the last two weeks NASA announced and presented its new four-year plan that looks at objectives with an end timeline that stretch out for as much as two decades in the future. The plan includes 4 key pillars:

This week’s headlines include: Breathing Out on Your Cell Phone Can Measure Your Lung Health; Crowdfunding Finances New Solar Powered Electric City Car; Tribe in Ecuador Fighting Exploitation by Oil Companies; “Star Trek” Holodeck a Decade Away; Crab Lice Becoming an