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The Turing Test

There can be little doubt that Artificial Intelligence will one day transform our lives although perhaps not for a few years as the following transcript from an online help session demonstrates. Appliance Technician’s Assistant – Welcome! How can I help with your appliance question? User – we intermittently get f11 errors on our 10 year old machine. any suggestions? Appliance Technician’s Assistant – […]

failed ideas

Is failure to be encouraged?

Despite the best efforts of experts to predict, real insight remains the rarest of commodities with most forecasts no more accurate than casual observation wrapped in lexicon. High profile examples from the world of economics, nature, politics and technology repeatedly demonstrate our inability to predict even the simplest of binary outcomes. Examined as a whole […]

Air Guitar

What would products look like if shape was defined not by the manufacturing process but by only the limits of the materials used instead?  Yes some might immediately shout 3D printing but in reality additive parts are constrained by machine dynamics, material format and design tool shortcomings as much as many traditional approaches.  So while most shapes […]

Step away from the keyboard!

Sending an e-mail is often used as a pretext for having actioned a task.  It is of course no such thing – more an expedient excuse.  A fire and forget one way ticket with the utility of a high speed carrier pigeon or worse a message in a bottle.  With 90% of communication non-verbal, text arriving on a […]

What did you do this week?

A seemingly innocuous phrase but one that is of some importance.  Yes of course we have all been busy.  Homelife, work, socialising.  We pack more and more into each day using ever thinner, intricately choreographed slices of time.  But that’s not really the point.  What did you achieve this week or perhaps better yet, what have […]

Mists of time

So where did Surface Generation and PtFS come from?  20 years of working in advanced manufacturing, over a million miles on long haul flights, pounding trade show floors around the world, talking to the best and brightest minds to understand the engineering challenges of tomorrow.  The result? An upside down view of the world that is just strange enough […]

Shaken, not stirred?

Looking at the mix of attendees at this weeks SAMPE conference / exhibition in Baltimore it was clear that a subtle but significant shift in the composites sector is underway.  Yes the traditional power houses that build high end aerospace hardware remain but this network is rapidly being joined by a new wave of suppliers and engineers targeting much broader markets. […]

Who is watching the watcher?

With Nevada’s ground breaking approval of autonomous truck operations tempered by the need to have a driver for complex situations it appears that a major milestone has been reached albeit in a state where distance is a bigger challenge than congestion.  Moving ahead, forthcoming 5G standards will allow high speed data transfer between interconnected vehicles and open limitless possibilities for real-time traffic management. Network […]