“The industry road map released next month will for the first time lay out an R&D plan that is not centred on Moore’s law…rather than making the chips better and letting the applications follow, it will start with applications…and work downwards to see what chips are needed to support them.”
Should be quite interesting to see what next month’s road map includes. (See here for a nice
collection of charts showing the progression of Moore’s Law courtesy of the Economist).
02: On the matter of
self-driving cars, the U.S. NTSA ruled this week that it
“…will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants.” This is a big deal. Regulators have so far separated autonomous vehicles depending on one of four levels of automation (
from function-specific through to full self-driving [PDF]). This framework has in turn informed discussions around liability and behaviour of each class of vehicle.
While the ruling doesn’t appear to adjust these classes, it does put the onus on Google to build a car that drives itself, but can
pass a certification intended for human-driven vehicles. A certification process that
often cites human anatomy (hand on wheel, foot on pedal etc.) so will still likely require modification regardless. You can
find the full letter here.
03: And now for a bit of mundane theatre: A short conversation between two AIs tasked with setting a coffee date on behalf of two humans. The comments below are equally interesting. Apparently humans (trained Executive Assistants no less!) “
intervene when the AI’s confidence level falls below a certain threshold”. (Can’t decide if I feel terribly bad for the humans or if this will free their time to organise more fun stuff…or at the very least, stuff that requires limbs).
04: Algo.Rhythm is a set of drum robots with programmable behavior. Each drum robot records pattern of beats when knocked on, and replays the rhythm by hitting its neighbour robot with a pre-programmed twist.