Showing 1 - 7 of 7
Have we passed the point of no return with AI?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/06/2023
» 'Sometimes I think it's as if aliens have landed and people haven't realised because they speak very good English," said Geoffrey Hinton, the 'godfather of AI' (Artificial Intelligence), who resigned from Google and now fears his godchildren will become "things more intelligent than us, taking control".
Do we need more rockets in the stratosphere?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 27/08/2021
» If you're worried about your "carbon footprint" -- a concept foisted on the world in 2004 by British Petroleum to persuade people that their own behaviour, and not giant oil companies like BP, is causing the climate problem -- then you definitely should not sign up for a sub-orbital space flight. Besides, you probably can't afford it (US$250,000 -- about 8 million baht -- per person).
Shipping is worse than aviation
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 30/03/2021
» 'We're waiting on food goods like coconut milk and syrups, some spare parts for motors, we've got some fork lift trucks, some Amazon goods on there, all sorts," said Steve Parks of Seaport Freight Services in England, who is awaiting twenty of the 18,300 containers aboard the Ever Given. Which of those things cannot be sourced from somewhere closer than Asia?
Are we ready for the first real automatons?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 30/01/2021
» They were planning to put on a play written by an artificial intelligence programme in Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic, this month, to mark the invention of robots (or at least the idea of robots) in the same city exactly one hundred years ago. The coronavirus pandemic got in the way of that, and it will now only be available free online late next month. Kind of symbolic, really: the future is quite different than what they expected.
Silent majority in Catalonia need to find their voice
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 31/10/2017
» It's been going on for a while. "Recently in Catalonia we have been living through a kind of 'soft' totalitarianism... the illusion of unanimity created by the fear of expressing dissent," wrote best-selling Catalan author Javier Cercas in the Spanish newspaper El Pais in 2014. Those who didn't want independence kept their heads down and their mouths shut, in other words.
A tale of two bombs -- in Manchester and Bangkok
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/05/2017
» There were two bombs on Monday. The one in Britain killed at least 22 people and injured 120 as they came out of a concert at Manchester Arena. It was carried out by a suicide bomber named Salman Abedi and claimed by the Islamic State (IS). The other was in Thailand, and injured 22 people at a military-linked hospital in Bangkok; nobody has claimed responsibility yet. But what happened afterwards was very different.
British petulance is shaping European Union's future
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 24/02/2016
» What would you call a country that called for "a structure under which [Europe] can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom ... a kind of United States of Europe" at the end of the Second World War (Winston Churchill, 1946), but refused to join that structure when its European neighbours actually began building it (European Economic Community, or EEC, 1957)?