Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
Self-driving cars have been a science fiction staple for years, featuring in movies like “Demolition Man” and “Total Recall”. Given that 1.2 million people a year die in accidents on the roads, it is hardly surprising that people have been trying to make this particular piece of fiction into reality for quite some time. The…
The first use of an unmanned aerial explosive device was when the Austrian army deployed hundreds of balloons carrying explosives in their siege of Venice, which was fighting for independence against Austria. That was in 1849. Technology has moved on since then, but the use of drones has been a military tactic for longer than…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a major impact on the creative arts. This does not just apply to books and articles, but also to artistic images, music and video. Large language models (LLMs), the underlying basis of generative AI, are capable of writing a poem, a song or an essay, and generating an image, cartoon…
The oil and gas industries are some of the largest in the world, with a market size of over $7 trillion. Just over half of that is exploration and production, the rest being refining and distribution. It employs over 12 million people, with a further 60 million employed indirectly by its suppliers. While an oil…
We have grown used to computers behaving consistently. If you type a formula into Excel to multiply two numbers together, not only will the answer be correct, but it will produce the same result when you next open the spreadsheet. This is not the way that large language models (LLMS), the models underlying generative AI,…
Chatbots, driven by the large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI, have become a part of everyday life. Customer help desks have often been replaced by an AI assistant, or are used in conjunction with human support staff. They can be quite effective, with a Harvard study in 2025 finding that human customer service…
All generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are based on artificial neural networks that are trained on huge amounts of data, such as text or images. The large language models (LLMs) that underlie this technology are voracious in their need to ingest training data in massive quantities. Some of the…
Science fiction is full of AIs that have gone rogue. The HAL 9000 computer in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” determined that the crew of the spaceship it operated was superfluous to its mission and attempted to kill them all when it suspected they were plotting to shut it down. When…
Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular its trendiest flavour, called generative AI, is having an increasing impact on the world’s environment. The large language models (LLMs) that are the basis of generative AI require prodigious computing resources. An LLM needs to be trained on data and, once up and running, then produces answers to user prompts.…
With all the current levels of excitement about generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of chatbots like ChatGPT and its rivals, it is easy to forget that the scope of AI goes well beyond this particular strand of AI. The media is awash with stories about the large language models (LLMs) that underpin generative…