Here is a family photograph. I know who the one on the left is, but not the one on the right, and I long to know more. If only she could tell me something about herself. If only she could talk. Well, one day maybe not so far away, she will. I’ve been writing aboutRead More
At the start of the current exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, you are told that 25% of the people on the planet play video games. I am one of the 75%. I do not play video games; indeed, I do not think I have played a video game of any kindRead More
Xinhua, China’s state news agency, announced this week what was claimed to be the world’s first AI news anchor. It presented to a conference in Wuzhen two virtual anchors, each derived from human newsreaders working for Xinhua. There was a Chinese-speaking anchor, based on Qiu Hao, and an English-speaking anchor, based on Zhang Zhao. BothRead More
There has probably been no more romantic human dream than the wish to fly. To defy gravity is to break through the bounds that tie we humans down. It is death-defying, an expression of immortality. Anyone who gets on a plane today and does not think – irrespective of what knowledge of aeronautical physics theyRead More
Zone Out (via The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) I am aware that I am turning into something of a robot bore. Whatever the human activity, be it work or pleasure, I have become far too prone in conversation to tell people how said activity will be taken over and then transformed by artificial intelligence. AndRead More
If only the world were not as it is. If only we could rebuild it. Well, some are hoping to do just that. It was reported last week that Sidewalks Labs, the urban development company owned by Alphabet (Google’s parent company), is to build a model city – or at least part of a cityRead More
Here’s what tomorrow looks like. At last week’s Google Cloud Next Conference held in San Francisco, Google announced a new API (application programme interface) entitled Cloud Video Intelligence. With such an application, developers will be able to detect objects within videos and make them word-searchable, as well as detecting scene changes and tagging objects accordingly.Read More
I started out my career in moving images back in 1986, as a cataloguer. I worked at the National Film Archive (as it then was), describing the films and television programmes that we acquired by country, title, date, creators and performers. The films were indexed according to subject – we used the Universal Decimal ClassificationRead More
There is coming, I think, a great change in how we discover things on the Internet. It is one which will play a major part in making the moving image central to knowledge and research, which is the goal that I am trying to pursue professionally. The great change will be brought about by speech-to-textRead More