Chris Horn

Columbia

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Articles

Nuclear comes back into fashion as AI and data centres manage their energy challenge

Jan 16, 2025 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

In an opinion piece at the start of the year, my colleague Mark O’Connell reflected that recent advances in artificial intelligence are both a technological and societal inflection point. He noted the extraordinary energy requirements of the vast server farms and data centres that enable the technology, observing that Ireland plays a crucial but disproportionate role in this new industry.
Silicon Valley seeks an audience at the court of Trump

Jan 2, 2025 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

He strongly distrusted everyone in the capital, so much so that when he became king, he demurred from staying at the official residence, preferring instead a pretentious new palace centred around a sporting hunting lodge. Many of his nobility prudently decided to relocate from their own provincial manor estates to be close to him. He noticed if individuals were absent from his court and rewarded those who spent their time in his presence.
China the key for tech’s raw materials whether Trump likes it or not

Dec 12, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

US president-elect Donald Trump has declared several times that when he commences office on January 20th one of his immediate priorities will be to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all goods coming into the USA from both Mexico and Canada, and a 10 per cent additional tariff on all goods imported from China. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has given a bristly response, criticising US spending on weapons and hinting at reciprocal tariffs.
Geese and sharks show airlines the way to fuel efficiency

Nov 28, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

In October 2022, after intensive diplomacy at a meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in Montreal, 184 countries agreed an aspirational goal of making the aviation industry net neutral of carbon emissions by 2050. Ireland has a key global role in this ambition. Approximately 58 per cent of all civil aircraft worldwide are leased and, of these, about 50 per cent are leased through more than 30 leasing companies operating in Ireland.
Chris Horn: AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality, and its true business impact has yet to be proven

Nov 14, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

Joe makes a call from a phone booth. It costs him 60 cents for each minute of his call. After 10 minutes, the price drops to 50 cents per minute. How much would a 30 minute call cost him? Questions like these are a part of a suite of arithmetic tests for US grade schools, typically targeting 10 to 11 year olds. Mathematical reasoning is key to problem solving. It therefore can be used to measure the capabilities of an artificial intelligence (AI) system.
Satellite wars: Elon Musk’s Starlink faces competition for global communications network

Oct 24, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

In the summer of 1995, I took one of the most eventful journeys in my life when I interrupted our family holiday in Connemara for a critical business trip. I boarded the Galway bus and then another on to Shannon, flew to New York and finally on to Phoenix, Arizona. My destination was the headquarters of Motorola satellite communications. My family understandably were quite unhappy with the interruption.
Boeing and Intel symbolise America’s manufacturing decline

Oct 10, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

Pennsylvania is a critical swing state in the imminent US presidential election. Contributing 19 votes to the national electoral college, the state was narrowly won by Donald Trump by a mere 0.72 per cent in 2016, and by Joe Biden with a similarly slender margin of 1.17 per cent four years later. The state is squarely in the rust belt, with prosperity historically from steel manufacturing, coal and iron ore mining.
Will GenAI technology ever justify the heavy investment being made?

Sep 26, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

Alan Turing, the British mathematician who broke the German Enigma encryption code during the second World War, devised what has become known as the Turing test to determine whether a machine is capable of imitating human-like intelligence. Recently an Australian government senate committee used his fabled test to assess whether a generative artificial intelligence large language model (GenAI LLM) could match or even surpass the quality of work done by its own staff.
How sharks are helping the aviation industry to reduce carbon emissions

Sep 5, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has asserted that the aviation industry will be entirely carbon neutral by 2050. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is one part of the solution. Existing fossil fuels release carbon into the atmosphere from crude oil deposits accumulated over aeons. Instead SAF relies on plants extracting carbon already in the atmosphere, converting the resulting biomass into fuel which then returns the captured carbon back into the atmosphere in engine exhaust gases.
Robots have come a long way since I saw them manufacture the Fiat Ritmo in 1978

Aug 15, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Chris Horn

As a young engineering undergraduate in Trinity College Dublin in 1978, I was lucky enough to go on one of the annual overseas student trips organised by the university’s student engineering society. Certain excursions in prior years had raised a few eyebrows: to Moscow (despite the Cold War) and to Tripoli (where Muammar Gadafy was very much in power), but I had unfortunately missed out on both.