Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Via the Google research blog, an interesting piece of work on a particularly thorny problem: how best to respond to emails without resorting to a sub-optimal phone keyboard. The solution? Train a neural network to sieve out the meaning of each email, use this to determine three likely (and different!) possible responses, and suggest them to the user via the Google Inbox app, allowing an appropriate reply to be sent with a couple of taps.

Its easy to lose track of just how SFnal everyday life has become but every so often, something comes along to remind you. Like being able to video chat with my parents on their boat somewhere in the Greek islands. Or realising that my the computer sat on my desktop has roughly twice the storage of the supercomputer we used a decade ago.

But somethings remain a disappointment: no flying cars; no mission to Jupiter; no HAL 9000. Actually, now that I think about it, it might be best to scratch that last one...