"There's more regulation on a food truck than there is on this technology," Emilia Javorsky, director of the Futures Program at the Future of Life Institute, said during a panel at SXSW on Monday.

Google’s co-founder has reportedly urged the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) teams to “turbocharge” their work. Sergey Brin, who stepped down as Google’s president in 2019 but retains a seat on the board, says that means coming into the office “at least every week day,” working 60-hour weeks, and moving faster, The Verge reported Saturday (March 1), citing an internal memo. “It has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM [Google DeepMind],” Brin wrote

by Max MaxfieldAs one gets older, one becomes ever more set in one’s ways, and one increasingly uses words like one to refer to oneself. One manifestation of this is that I often find myself responding to things with “canned” replies, as if flying on conversational autopilot mode.Take, for example, when someone says, “So, that’s the plan.” My default retort is, “Let’s call it ‘Plan A’ so no one gets confused.”Alternatively, I might trot out the old chestnut, “If we don’t have a plan, we’re no better than the French!” (but not if I’m conversing with a French person because they famously have no sense of humor… or taste, as evidenced by the fact they foolishly disparage English haute cuisine).These were my only “go-to” rejoinders on the ‘plan’ front … until now. Earlier today, a friend introduced me to a quote attributed to Spike Milligan: “We haven’t got a plan, so nothing can go wrong!”That just made my day (I’m easily amused). I wonder how long it will be before I find a way to work this tidbit of trivia into one of my columns (Oh, wait…).But we digress…My poor old noggin is currently brimming over with ponderings pertaining to artificial intelligence (AI); more specifically, to AI-powered robots and AI-powered holograms. I’ve written about both topics in the last couple of years, but all sorts of new ideas are popping into my head.Before we go there, however, I’d like to share another interesting nugget of knowledge that just sauntered across my sensorium in the form of a design challenge intended to stimulate the commercialization of compelling and commercially viable MEMS devices.I just heard from the folks at MEMS Infinity, who tell me they recently launched their MEMS Infinity Challenge. This is a global design competition that directly encourages the design and production of exceptional new MEMS devices