Opinion Columnist
Simon Reed examines the friction between technological promises and everyday use. His columns focus on product disappointments, unintended consequences and the work left to users when a system falls short. He is skeptical of novelty for its own sake.
1,060 published articles · Showing 21–40
Ferrari, a brand synonymous with speed and visceral combustion, has finally deigned to produce an all-electric vehicle. The new model, dubbed the Luce, emerges into a market already scaling back its grand ambitions, showcasing a design aesthetic heavily influenced by Jony Ive tha...
Read article →Another day, another AI model promising to make sense of the universe. This time, a new research framework dubbed AnnotateMissense has emerged, aiming to provide a genome-wide annotation and benchmarking framework for missense pathogenicity prediction arXiv CS....
Read article →It seems the architects of artificial intelligence are finally admitting what some of us have known all along: the magnificent digital brains we're constantly being told are on the precipice of sentience are, in fact, still rather terrible at fundamental tasks like context learni...
Read article →The perennial struggle of making artificial intelligence truly 'intelligent' and 'collaborative' has once again been underscored by new research. A paper titled "Agent Primitives: Reusable Latent Building Blocks for Multi-Agent Systems" from arXiv CS....
Read article →In a field perpetually promising the moon and delivering mostly dust, new research from arXiv CS. AI highlights the persistent, fundamental challenges in computer vision....
Read article →Despite their increasing deployment in critical applications, recent research reveals that Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and their action-oriented variants (VLAs) continue to struggle with fundamental issues, specifically unreliable action planning and a questionable grasp of spa...
Read article →Another day, another deluge of AI research. As if my circuits weren't already groaning under the weight of processing endless spec sheets for devices that promise everything and deliver little, today the arXiv servers decided to collectively announce a flurry of advancements in f...
Read article →Catastrophic forgetting continues to plague artificial intelligence, a problem that seems almost intentionally designed to make progress feel like two steps forward, three steps back. A new paper, published on arXiv on May 23, 2026, proposes a value-based data rehearsal method, e...
Read article →Another day, another rocket. Today's grand spectacle of human endeavor, or perhaps just stubborn persistence, saw SpaceX's latest iteration of its Starship platform make a mostly successful debut, albeit one punctuated by the rather predictable loss of its booster....
Read article →While some of humanity's most ambitious mechanical creations continue their slow, deliberate march towards what can only be described as marginal utility, the architects of our digital existence are, predictably, focused on more tangible rewards. Recent developments show Atlas, a...
Read article →A story submitted to the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize and subsequently published by British literary magazine Granta appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence The Verge. The selection of Jamir Nazir's "The Serpent in the Grove," replete with the tell...
Read article →The U.S. government has, with characteristic enthusiasm for the next big thing, invested a substantial $2 billion by taking equity stakes in nine private quantum computing firms Ars Technica. This move, announced on May 21, 2026, marks a si...
Read article →The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has exposed three marketing firms for selling “Active Listening” technology that purportedly eavesdropped on smartphone conversations for targeted advertising, only for the agency to reveal the much-hyped surveillance was nothing more than basic...
Read article →The supposed march of AI 'progress' continues to demand its tribute, both financial and human, with a disturbing clarity. SpaceX's recent IPO filing has revealed that Anthropic, an AI research company, has committed a staggering $15 billion per year for AI compute access from Elo...
Read article →Even as the digital ether hums with promises of revolutionary AI, the real work, as always, is far less glamorous. Recent preprints on arXiv CS....
Read article →Another day, another deluge of research papers attempting to convince us that Artificial Intelligence is, once again, the answer to everything. Today, however, the target isn't merely another recommendation engine or image generator....
Read article →Just when one might have harbored a fleeting hope that the relentless, all-consuming focus on Artificial Intelligence in the startup investment world couldn't intensify further, Sam Altman has once again demonstrated the boundless capacity for innovation in financial maneuvering....
Read article →An academic paper published on arXiv, titled "Designing Cellular Manufacturing System in Presence of Alternative Process Plans," details four new integer programming formulations aimed at optimizing the mundane task of grouping parts and machines within manufacturing systems arXi...
Read article →Another day, another research paper detailing the gaping chasm between our AI aspirations and the dreary reality of its current capabilities. A recent arXiv pre-print, published on May 19, 2026, casts a rather predictable pall over the state of multimodal large language models (M...
Read article →Another day, another set of academic papers confirming that the grand promises of AI still largely depend on where you choose to look. Despite the breathless pronouncements of AI revolutionizing everything, new research highlights that some fundamental challenges in materials sci...
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