Tim Danton Editor-in-chief
Like many PC Pro readers, I suspect, I love a drop of science fiction. Particularly when I want to remove my mind from what’s happening in the world and transport it to a different point in the space-time continuum. Isaac Asimov remains one of my favourite sci-fi authors, and on impulse a couple of weeks ago I bought a compendium of his robot stories on my Kindle.
Unfortunately, rather than transporting me from my everyday life, the book merely echoes it. While the word “robots” may conjure up images of metal humanoids performing dangerous duties, several of Asimov’s meatier stories revolve around the Brain – an all-knowing sentient computer that can see things mere humans cannot.
You can put forward an argument that we already have various Brains in today’s world. But rather than sitting in a giant room, as Asimov’s does, ours are distributed across the planet. When we call upon Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa to do our bidding – and we discuss each of these platforms’ merits and flaws in our smart-home Labs from p76 – our instructions are beamed up to the cloud.
This raises privacy concerns, and they’re growing all the time. That’s one reason why we’re seeing a trend that Asimov, if you’re willing to squint, predicted. For while the Brain is in effect ruler of the world, each of the humanoid robots created by the US Robots & Mechanical Men corporation contains its own positronic brain. This is a mixture of electronics and metal alloys, but – and this is where it helps to squint – if you replace “robot” with “laptop” and substitute silicon substrate for alloys, then we are indeed moving towards Asimov’s world.
Now, I realise there are flaws to this analogy. For one, laptops are never going to help you in and out of bed, even machines as versatile as the Surface Laptop Studio 2 (see p52). But there’s no doubt these localised AI brains will slowly grow in power to supplement our reasoning, which not only avoids the huge power demands of gigantic data centres but also protects our privacy. The information we share will stay on our local machines, and that has to be a good thing.
I mention all this because I’m in the middle of reviewing the Acer Swift 16 complete with AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U processor (see p42). This chip integrates the AI smarts from Xilinx to create what AMD calls Ryzen AI,
