Peter Principle

Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life

Recently, however, researchers have begun to speak of an A.I. Spring emerging as scientists develop theories on the workings of the human mind. They are being aided by the exponential increase in processing power, which has created computers with millions of times the power of those available to researchers in the 1960’s — at consumer prices.“The implication of this is amazing. What you are seeing is that cognitive computing is at a cusp where it’s knocking on the door of potentially mainstream applications.”

Wow, such optimism. Could you pack any more qualifiers in that sentence?

Philip Zimmermann is in hot water again. The author of the PGP encryption program has just released Zfone, which encrypts voice-over-IP phone calls. This is sure to prompt debate about the use of encryption for personal and business communication.

Unlike PGP, Zfone does not require exchanging public keys. It exchanges keys inside the voice channel as the call is being set up. Zfone does not work with Skype, one of the most popular VoIP programs, which uses its own encryption scheme. But the NYT reports that Skype’s encryption has been broken by the German government.

At a conference last week in Cyprus, German officials said they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls, according to Anthony M. Rutkowski, vice president for regulatory affairs and standards for VeriSign.

President Bush visited California last weekend. One of his stops was at the Fuel Cell Partnership, where he again promoted hydrogen as the ‘fuel of future’.

“I strongly believe hydrogen is the fuel for the future,” he said. “It produces no pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. It can be twice as effective as gas. It can be provided from domestic sources and dramatically curb our dependence on foreign oil. It’s the wave of the future.”

Of course, today we produce hydrogen from fossil fuels like oil and gas. Many scientists refer to hydrogen as a means of transporting energy, rather than an energy source. According to MIT Prof. Mildred Dresselhaus:

While hydrogen has advantages, it’s “not a fuel. You can’t mine it. We would have to make nine million tons a year, and eventually, 20 times more than that,” Dresselhaus said. Because hydrogen is currently produced from fossil fuels, scientists would have to find a way to produce it from sustainable sources such as rainfall and ocean water.

So why is the president so excited about the technology?

Critics say Bush, a former oil executive, has fastened on the far-away technology because it enables him to be seen as environmentally progressive without having to immediately jolt the oil industry with alternative energy initiatives.

A report from Merrill Lynch estimates that the Sony PlayStation 3 will cost as much as $900 to manufacture. But Sony will need to heavily discount the console to compete with the $400 Xbox 360. The PS3 might also be delayed by several months while Sony tries to complete standards for the Blu-ray DVD drive.

Merrill Lynch speculated in a research note last week that the debut of the PS3 could be postponed as much as six to 12 months, with an autumn launch in Japan and a late 2006 or early 2007 launch in the United States, and that the cost to manufacture the game console might be as high as $900 apiece.

More news this week on the MIT Media Lab effort to build a $100 laptop. Nicholas Negroponte announced agreements with several governments and technology companies.

Mr. Negroponte said that he had a commitment from Quanta Computer of Taiwan to manufacture the portable computers, which would initially use a processing chip from AMD. He also said he had raised $20 million to pay for engineering and was close to a final commitment of $700 million from seven nations — Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, India, China, Brazil and Argentina — to purchase seven million of the laptops.

Microsoft, apparently worried about the prospect of tens of millions of PCs around the world running Linux, is trying to derail the effort. They’re advocating smart cellphones, adding a keyboard for input and a TV as a display. It’s not clear whether this is a serious proposal, or just throwing sand in the gears.

“Everyone is going to have a cellphone,” Mr. Mundie said, noting that in places where TV’s are already common, turning a phone into a computer could simply require adding a cheap adaptor and keyboard. Microsoft has not said how much those products would cost.

The M.I.T. Media Lab had experimented with the idea of a cellphone that would project a computer display onto a wall and also project the image of a keyboard, sensing the motion of fingers over it. But the researchers decided the idea was less practical than a laptop.

[Some specialists] have raised questions about [...] the price of Internet connectivity, which can cost $24 to $50 a month in developing nations. But Mr. Negroponte said networking costs would not be an obstacle because the laptops would be made to connect automatically in a so-called mesh network, making it possible for up to 1,000 computers to wirelessly share just one or two land-based Internet connections.