Showing 1 - 7 of 7
AI learning versus human creativity is a real battle
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/02/2026
» If you’ve been reading these columns long enough, you’ll probably know that I write music and I’ve written some books. With the advent of artificial intelligence, the concept of copyright and private property has blurred. The standard rule was, what you have worked hard on to create, belongs to you. As musicians and authors, ideally, we create, we write and we invent. In the world of AI, it will draw a picture, write a book and create music for you based on a simple text prompt that itself may have also been written for you by AI.
Jetsons cars finally take off
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/03/2025
» Some readers will remember the old cartoon The Jetsons. This promised a future with flying cards, robot assistants and helpful computer tools. We have or are getting very close to the robot assistants, and the latest artificial intelligence offerings seem to be the automated helpers. Missing to date are the flying cars. That may have changed with the new Jetson ONE, a single person flying car I saw a demonstration of in a recent video. It looked good, seemed to fly with good stability and landed without any issue. You can find the demos with a simple search. The craft has vertical take-off and landing capability. However, I shudder to think of what thousands of these might look like in the skies above a city without some serious improvements in driving and collision avoidance.
Microsoft's quantum conundrum
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/03/2025
» If you've been keeping up with quantum computer news, you will have seen the Microsoft Marketing announcement on topological q-bits and a potential quantum computer in a few years. I was planning to write about this in some detail, but it turns out the reality may not meet the marketing. Surprising, I know, but the announcement implying Microsoft has q-bit technology ready to go and scale is speculative. They don't have any physical models, just some tests and a theory that has already been challenged by the physics community. It will take a while to go through all the published data, but the Microsoft quantum computer could be decades, not years, in the future, if ever.
Predictions for 2024
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/01/2024
» I hope you all had a great holiday break and are ready to dive into whatever 2024 brings us. Once again I will try and guess what we will see this year. The first one is easy, a bigger focus on artificial intelligence and even more marketing using the term AI. I wonder if we will see Turbo-AI appear. There will be more funds diverted to the growth of AI in many of the major manufacturers. I'm not convinced we will reach General AI this year but it is a possibility.
Big Brother grows bigger
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/06/2022
» For some time now I have been having problems with USB and my hard drive letters. Over the course of a day or three, with the exception of C:, hard drives letters would vanish. I have C, W, X and Y. C is an SSD on the motherboard with the other three normal hard drives at 10, 10 and 8 TB. The other problem I had was the computer locking up as the system was scanning for a missing USB drive, even if I ejected them using the correct process. The exception was any Samsung phone that I tried to eject without success.
Post-Covid world is challenging
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/11/2021
» In the Covid and post-Covid world will the online meeting still reign? For many in the workplace who are working from home it is their lifeline with colleagues and managers. According to chief analyst Matthew Ball, one of the five issues currently challenging industry is better human collaboration.
Learning in the time of crisis
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/04/2020
» There is a mix of good and bad information regarding Covid-19 on the internet so be careful that what you are reading isn't fake news, especially when it comes to numbers and cures. The numbers available are those reported by each country and are based on testing and the honesty of each government, so will vary from the actual state. This is where the major social media platforms are being exposed even more. They are deleting valid information, such as on hydroxychloroquine trials, while promoting hit pieces on globalisation.