The Fredösphere

The Economist magazine calls it their Technology Quarterly, but much of its content is sci-fi and futurology, as my friend Evan pointed out.  There are articles on Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, space elevators, and Babel fish.  Great fun.  An article offers three rules of thumb for spotting a vision of the future that has half a chance of coming true.  Another describes the field of artificial artificial intelligence, which seeks to solve problems difficult for present computers by luring many human minds into taking a stab at it.  Find a way to dress the problem up as a video game, put it on line, and suddenly, pimply-faced adolescents can start earning money in a way indistinguishable from goofing off.  Let it be!  Music intelligence systems can identify hit songs more reliably than experienced executives in the music biz:

To the human ear, music has changed a lot over the years.  Music-intelligence software, however, can reveal striking similarities in the underlying parameters of two songs from different eras that, even to a trained ear, seem unrelated.  According to Platinum Blue's software, called Music Science, for example, a number of hit songs by U2 have a close kinship to some of Beethoven's compositions.

Let it not be!