Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am

Here's my latest column for the Maidenhead Advertiser.


Two interesting technological stories have developed this week.   

Firstly, a survey done in the US about narcissism has revealed that the more one posts on social media the more self-involved one may be.  They needed to do a survey to tell us that?  It claimed that Facebook acted as a mirror to the user’s perceived image whereas Twitter was more of a megaphone for younger people’s opinions.  My view is that younger people just got fed up with seeing photos of themselves as babies posted on Facebook by their parents and moved on to Twitter to escape it. 

Secondly, a British computer company has been sold to Google this week.  The business specialises in Artificial Intelligence, developing machines which can mimic the brain’s ability to improve performance.  Google have always wanted to build a search engine so sophisticated that it knows users better than they know themselves. Thus in the future, a large majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking.  Handy - but what if your mind is like mine and often on several tangents at any one time?  Will there be an algorithm suitable for my individual ramblings?  It is quite likely that my mind might actually short circuit the computer.

But do you know what annoys me the most?  It might be easy to order food and have it delivered just by thinking it, but it still requires someone to cook it.  Unless someone out there is developing a robotic housewife?  Please let me know.





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