Distributed Intelligence Gets Real


I write for a living, which means a lot of typing. But it can also mean a lot of talking, thanks to technology. For six years now, I’ve happily used voice-to-text apps on my smart phone. These cloud-based services have made me immensely more productive, whether it’s dictating an email or a story idea. I once dictated an entire blog post into my phone while I was driving (don’t tell an... » read more

Happy 25th Birthday, HAL!


“Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H. A. L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January, 1992.”—Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Nearly a half-century ago, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick introduced us to cinema’s most compelling example of artificial intelligence: the HAL 9000, a heuristicall... » read more

The Looming AI War


A recent spate of acquisitions and announcements in AI and machine learning is setting the stage for a colossal showdown across the tech industry. Among those vying for top spots are Samsung, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, each with a large enough revenue stream to support an M&A feeding frenzy and the sustained investments required to remain competitive. Consider the most recent a... » read more

Sometime More Is More And Less…


Anyone who has been reading this blog has already figured out that as an ex-system designer, I am a fan of intelligent IP subsystems, and in a couple of my previous posts I already talked about how they make design easier by distributing the overall complexity. The other day however, I found myself trying to describe to a non-semiconductor person why this move is good and what benefits it de... » read more