US regulator green lights self-driving car research with $4Bn cheque
With the US Government and NHTSA agree to speed up the roll out of self-driving cars With automakers and technology companies rushing to develop self-driving cars, the Obama administration has pledged to expedite regulatory guidelines for autonomous vehicles and invest in research to help bring them to market. Until now, the federal government...
The first private moon landing gets the green light
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF More and more private organisations are taking on the final frontier, now Moon Express have a license to land on the Moon. Less than half a century after Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the moon the FAA has granted approval...
DeepMind AI reduces Googles data centre cooling bills by 40%
The amount of energy consumed by the world’s largest hyper scale data centers has always posed the technology companies that run them with a conundrum. On the one hand the companies need more compute power to continue supporting their growing empires and on the other hand more servers and more...
Researchers create a kill switch to terminate rogue AI agents
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Researchers have a new weapon in the war against the rogue AI’s of the future. Love the Exponential Future? Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, connect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. Scientists from Google’s Artificial Intelligence division, DeepMind, and Oxford University are...
Google’s Project Magenta wants to be a musician
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Project Magenta will do for music what Google Deep dream does for images. It’s a long way to Carnegie Hall, but we bet that Google researchers are already thinking of the day when their Artificial Intelligence protege “Magenta” can cut an album that beats...
Google is making its own custom AI chips
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many of the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have only been made possible because companies now have access to previously unimaginable amounts of computing power, but now there is an arms race to create the “best” AI infrastructure stack. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced today...
JJ Abrams Moon Shot shorts show off the scientists behind Google’s Lunar XPRIZE
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Access to space was once the preserve of rich government institutions but with costs falling the sky’s the limit as private entrepreneurs set their sights on landing on the Moon. It can be easy to forget the human element behind robotic spaceflight. When we...
Google reinvents hyperscale storage
Organisations that operate hyperscale cloud data centers, such as Alibaba, AWS, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Tencent have always pushed the limits of what’s technically possible with yesterday’s hardware so in 2011 it came as no surprise that they formed the Open computing Project alliance, a program that set about to...
Apples new trojan horse
Love it or loathe it the Apple Watch is superbly positioned to help Apple capture three new mass markets Even Apple can’t escape the gravity of centuries of tradition and the Apple Watch is a great case in point. Sure enough it sits on the wrist like a regular watch, looks like a...
The rise of the Innovative CIO
The CIO’s role is changing driven by Cloud and an increasing number of ‘as a Service’ solutions that progressively reduce the organisations dependency on maintaining a high number of specially skilled ICT staff. Under these new conditions organisations have two options – they can make their technology managers, architects and...
Google is being disrupted
Alphabets new structure is a response to Googles falling ad revenues and increased competitive pressure An Exercise Thank you for reading my article but be warned that I’m going to ask you to take part in a quick exercise and to incentivise you to do so I’m going to...
In the future everything will be connected
In 400 years time our descendants will look back at our Age in the same way we look at the Stone Age Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius, by combining his observations of the laws of nature with his passion for mechanical invention he managed to conceive early versions of...
Google’s new quantum computer is 100 million times faster than your PC
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Googles D-Wave quantum computer breaks the speed barrier and leaves everything else in its dust. Google announced a breakthrough in the field of Quantum computing on Wednesday. The company thinks it’s found a quantum algorithm that solves problems 100 million times faster than conventional processes. If...