Blowing hot and cold

At close yesterday, I read a rather depressing note from MIT about the difficulty of getting contact tracing going in the US. All sorts of challenges, not least our tendency, having been trained by years of nuisance phone calls from parts east, of putting the phone down when one recognises neither voice nor number. Made more depressing by my doubts about our government's ability to overcome comparable challenges over here.

Then, this morning, a much more optimistic note from Ray Kurzweil about how the development of anti-viral drugs and vaccines is being massively accelerated by the arrival of super computers and AI on the scene. See reference 1.

Kurzweil has long been optimistic about the good uses to which large computers can and will be put: perhaps he will be right on this occasion - so getting Donald - and us - off the hook.

PS: as it happens, I had personal experience of putting the phone down yesterday, when a delivery driver phoned me up to ask, without much preliminary, where I lived. With the delivery of my English cheese being delayed a day as a result. But at least the parcel did not get lost somewhere in the margins of the DPD depot at Feltham. A DPD operation which is supported by heavy duty IT - but IT which does not always recover well from error or mischance. A depot which comes up loud and clear on gmaps - just a stone's throw away from the interestingly named Intelligence Collection Group & Defence Geographic Centre, presumably the third millennium name for the army Mapping and Charting operation (MCE) which used to work out of a collection of (wartime?) huts in this very same Feltham. Not so very far from the famous young offenders institution. Has it been sold off to someone in the private sector? Perhaps from somewhere east of Suez? Perhaps somewhere hot? Do the Tories still believe in selling off stuff which even they might think was critical national infrastructure? While Corbyn's instinct would probably have been to close the place down as a relic of cold-war paranoia.

Reference 1: https://www.kurzweilai.net/wired-ai-powered-biotech-can-help-deploy-a-vaccine-in-record-time.

Reference 2: https://www.dpd.co.uk/.