A.I.

On Collective Imagination, Joe Salvo declares the Information Age is done for, writing: "a period of history can be characterized by the dominant technology that separates the leaders from the followers." He believes humanity has approached a tipping point where the separation between leaders and followers will cease to exist, as the internet democratizes the planet and good information becomes ubiquitous. So what's up next? Salvo calls it a "Systems Age," which involves "sensing, collecting, and manipulating data in near real-time with little to no human supervision." Sounds like a lot of…
Faster computers come out all the time, but it's what we do with a CPU that determines its true usefulness. On Good Math, Bad Math, Mark Chu-Carroll introduces us to Google's new programming language, Go. Noting the minimalist design of the language, Chu-Carroll writes "if you want a C-like language with some basic object-oriented features and garbage collection, Go is about as simple as you could realistically hope to get." On the hardware side of things, Jonah Lehrer reports on The Frontal Cortex that IBM researchers have simulated the synaptic equivalent of a cat's brain, using 147,456…