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Rough Type: Nicholas Carrs Blog

Almost humanToday

In the final round of competition for this year's Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence, held today at the University of Reading in the UK, a robot came within a whisker of passing the Turing Test. In a series conversations with people, the winning robot, named Elbot, fooled 25% of its interlocutors into believing it was a genuine human being. A score of 30% would have been sufficient to pass Turing's criterion for a true artificial intelligence.

Five machines competed in today's finals, and each of them managed to convince at least one person that it was human. All the robots, moreover, received strikingly high scores for their conversational skills. Reports Kevin Warwick, a professor in the University of Reading's School of Systems Engineering and the organizer of the test:

This has been a very exciting day with two of the machines getting very close to passing the Turing Test for the first time. In hosting the competition here, we wanted to raise the bar in Artificial Intelligence and although the machines aren't yet good enough to fool all of the people all of the time, they are certainly at the stage of fooling some of the people some of the time.

Today's results actually show a more complex story than a st

No worriesOctober 3

Congress's new and improved bailout bill includes, along with the obligatory helpings of pork, a provision that would increase FDIC bank deposit insurance from $100,000 to $250,000. Should the House pass the bill today, that boost in insurance would let a lot of Americans sleep a lot easier.

And that's the problem.

When the government provides free insurance for an investment - any investment - it removes considerations of risk from investors' decisions and, as a result, it distorts financial markets. In the worst-case scenario, that contributes to the kind of craziness that has put the world economy on a precipice. As Floyd Norris writes in the New York Times today:

As the ideas fly for saving the financial system, it is amazing — and appalling — how many of them seem to be straight out of the playbook from the savings and loan crisis. Then, as now, Congress decided to reassure investors by more than doubling the amount of deposits that could be insured ... The raising of the deposit guarantee limits in 1980 to $100,000, from $40,000, made depositors less concerned about the health of their institution, and made it easier for dying institutions to attract deposits. Raising the figure to $250,000 now could have the same effect.

I'm not suggesting that insuring bank deposits is a bad thing. An even worse worst-case scenario is the kind of panic

Here comes the "Windows Cloud"October 1

Amazon and Microsoft are about to be partners - and competitors.

Last night, Amazon's Werner Vogels announced that later this fall developers and companies will be able to run Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which up to now has been limited to Linux or other Unix-based systems. Given the broad popularity of the Microsoft operating system, the move promises to considerably expand the usefulness of the EC2 utility-computing system. According to Amazon:

Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services.

As Vogels notes, it will also become possible to run virtual Windows desktops from Amazon's cloud.

Details about pricing have yet to be released. The big question, as Alan Williams notes, is this: Will Microsoft adopt a true utility pricing model for

The email monsterOctober 1

Clive Thompson recently pointed to a post in which Amherst College's IT director provided some stats about the school's new freshman class. The students' tech habits are pretty much what you'd expect - everyone's on Facebook, no one has a landline, laptops have almost entirely supplanted desktops, and the Mac's beating the PC.

What I found most striking, though, were the stats on email. About 180,000 emails are received each day at the school (which has around 1,600 students), and 94% of those emails are spam. The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone's personal data warehouse.

With the management of email systems growing increasingly onerous, it's hardly a surprise that a lot of colleges are choosing to offload those systems to Google and other cloud providers.

Shooting at cloudsSeptember 29

Free software activist Richard Stallman is taking a break from his campaign to stop people from buying Harry Potter books to blast the concept of cloud computing. "It's stupidity," he tells the Guardian. "It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign." He's right, of course, about the "marketing hype campaign," but his real beef with the cloud is the same as his beef with corporate-owned software programs. "Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program," he says. "If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

And while you're at it, stock your cellar with lots of canned goods.

Stallman is a little late to this party. People have been voting for web apps, at least in rudimentary form, since back in the heyday of AOL. And they're going to continue using Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, TurboTax Online, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Photobucket, Twitter, etc., just as they're going to continue to buy J.K. Rowling's books. Why? Because, for better or worse, they like 'em. It's a done deal.

More on target was Larry Ellison's rant against the cloud last we