Here’s some news that confirms long held suspicions – Google are working on developing large scale artificial intelligence, according to Larry Page. How much of this is big talk and boosterism remains to be seen, but if the talk of AI as an emergent phenomenon has any truth to it, Google are the most likely folk to throw the right switches.
In more mundane news from the world of the Big G, they’ve added a whole bunch of new NASA data layers to Google Earth.
The world’s military forces have long been trying to crack the 100kW barrier for solid state lasers, which would make them ‘battlefield viable’. Brian Wang reports that they’re getting very close to cracking it, but suggests a more peaceful use for such technology – using laser beams to push satellites and probes to Mars in a matter of days rather than months.
Now this is just awesome – exactly the sort of thing I wish someone would set up here in the UK. OpenCongress exists to break down the barriers between American citizens and the Congress that represents them, by revealing all the complicated inner workings of the system. And as any mechanic or techie will tell you, once you know how a system works, you can start tweaking it so it works better… [BoingBoing]
In amongst New Scientist’s regular round-up of patents is a method for watermarking digital content, so that videos that escape into the public domain can notify their copyright owners and serve relevant adverts to the viewer. Hey, I’ll bet that system will never be hacked!
The Chinese are wasting no time in developing new technologies to further their ambitions in space. A team at Beijing University have developed a test prototype of a concept first mooted in the 1980s, the magnetic levitational launch assist vehicle, which could drastically cut the to-orbit cost of space missions.