John McCarthy RIP

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John McCarthy has died. Good obit by Jack Schofield in the Guardian tonight.

In 1955, the computer scientist John McCarthy, who has died aged 84, coined the term “artificial intelligence”, or AI. His pioneering work in AI – which he defined as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" – and robotics included the development of the programming language Lisp in 1958. This was the second such high-level language, after Fortran, and was based on the idea of computing using symbolic expressions rather than numbers.

McCarthy was also the first to propose a “time-sharing” model of computing. In 1961, he suggested that if his approach were adopted, “computing may some day be organised as a public utility, just as the telephone system is a public utility,” and that that utility could become the basis of a significant new industry. This is the way that ‘cloud computing’ is being sold today.

However, when obliged to choose between the time-sharing work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and AI, he chose AI. He said: “The ultimate effort is to make computer programs that can solve problems and achieve goals in the world as well as humans. However, many people involved in particular research areas are much less ambitious.”

What’s this? — the Digger admitting a mistake? Surely not?

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From The Register.

War-weary News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch made one concession at the company’s high drama AGM on Friday, stating the MySpace acquisition was a “huge mistake.”

The sorry tale of the social network’s digital demise at the hands of NewsCorp began with the purchase of MySpace for $US580 million in 2005. “We paid $US600 million. We could have sold it for $US6 billion a month later,” Murdoch told shareholders.

“I made a huge mistake. We then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way,” he said. But Murdoch then threw in the caustic barb, “all of the people concerned with it are no longer with the company.”

This isn’t strictly true as former AOL CEO Jon Miller, who joined News Corp in March 2009 as its great digital savant, is still apparently in Camp Murdoch as CEO of digital media and chief digital officer.

He was brought in to – among other digital super charging duties – turn the ailing fortunes of MySpace around. Despite ousting a lot of bodies and a couple of CEOs, it was pretty clear that this feat wasn’t going to happen. He then helped shift the asset into the hands of Justin Timberlake and Specific Media for $US35 million earlier this year.

Orchids

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Orchids, originally uploaded by jjn1.

A shot of an amazing plant — a generous present from one of my colleagues. I’d never before realised that the flowers look like butterflies. And the pattern on the ‘wings’ is reminiscent of medieval woodcuts of forests.

The march of folly

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The nemesis that perceptive economists like Paul Krugman have been predicting has arrived: stagflation — the grim confluence of inflation and economic stagnation. And what’s really eerie is how nobody in power in Britain can talk about it, let alone admit it. As Will Hutton puts it in today’s Observer.

The way we analyse and discuss our plight is crazily upside down. The Department for Business, which does have some interesting ideas for how to promote innovation, is browbeaten by the wider politics into making it a priority to take the ‘burden’ off business, allegedly to stimulate growth. Yet on most benchmarks, the UK is already the most lightly regulated member of the EU. It is absurd to characterise regulation and red tape as principal sources of the UK’s ills. This is voodoo economics.

Meanwhile, the story is nurtured that the coalition’s judicious austerity plans that were firmly on track are being derailed only by the crisis in the eurozone – the consequence of the madcap project to create a single currency in Europe. The enemies of the piece are thus deluded Europeans, anti-enterprise officials, unresolved global imbalances, excessive regulation and the 50p top rate of income tax, not to mention Gordon Brown’s legacy. There is nothing wrong – or so runs this line – with the gallant coalition’s economic strategy.

It is a story a lot of powerful and influential people – in finance, business, politics and the media – need to believe to cover their support for the coalition’s epic misjudgment when it took office. This was the decision to withdraw demand at a rate of 2% of GDP every year for four years in the wake of the biggest financial crisis in our history, alongside private sector debt levels higher even than in Japan before its lost two decades of growth.

Yep. So what we’re in for is a decade — maybe more — of stagflation. A re-run of Japan’s catastrophe. It’s nuts — and yet it’s happening before our eyes.

Digital Darwinism

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This morning’s Observer column.

This is a story about digital Darwinism. Once upon a time, the abiding nightmare of authors and students who used their PCs and laptops to compose books, dissertations and essays was that a random accident – theft of a laptop, perhaps, or a hard-disk crash – would be enough to vaporise years of irreplaceable work. So we all resorted to primitive schemes to protect against that terrible eventuality. In the early days, these took the form of piles of floppy disks stored at other locations; after that, we “burned” the precious files on to blank CDs; later still, we copied them on to USB sticks and flash drives that went in our pockets or on our keyrings; finally, we were even driven to emailing the damned things to ourselves.

Then along came an idea that made all these stratagems look, well, clumsy. It was called Dropbox. You logged on to the Dropbox site, registered (for free) and downloaded a small program (called a ‘client’) on to your computer. Once installed, this program created a special folder – helpfully labelled “Dropbox” – which appeared on your desktop. From then on, you saved any file that you wanted to back up in your Dropbox folder.

So far, so mundane. But even as you continued with your writing, the Dropbox client was busy in the background…