[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
search engine would understand everything in the world. A year later, in February 2007, he told
a group of scientists that Google has a team of employees who are really trying to build an
artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale. The fulfillment of their goal, he said, is not
as far off as people think.
In taking a transcendental view of information technology, seeing it as a way to
overcome what they perceive to be the physical limitations of the human brain, Brin and Page
are expressing a desire that has long been a hallmark of the mathematicians and computer
scientists who have devoted themselves to the creation of artificial intelligence. It s a desire that,
as David Noble notes in The Religion of Technology, can be traced all the way back to the
seventeenth-century French philosopher Ren Descartes, who argued that the body is always a
hindrance to the mind in its thinking and saw in mathematics a model for pure understanding.
The Cartesian ideal runs through the work of mathematicians like George Boole, Alfred North
Whitehead, and Alan Turing, whose breakthroughs in algebraic logic set the stage for the modern
binary computer.
In her 1979 book Machines Who Think, Pamela McCorduck wrote that artificial
intelligence promises to provide an extension of those human capacities we value most. She
quoted MIT professor Edward Fredkin s claim that artificial intelligence is the next step in
evolution. Danny Hillis, whose pioneering work in parallel computing paved the way for
Google s systems, argued in a 1992 interview that AI could provide a means of remedying man s
mental shortcomings, of fixing the bugs left over history, back from when we were animals,
and lead to the creation of beings who are better than us. In Reinventing Humanity, a 2006
article, the acclaimed inventor and author Ray Kurzweil predicted that artificial intelligence will
vastly exceed biological intelligence by the mid-2040s, resulting in a world where there is no
distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality.
To most of us, the desire of the AI advocates to merge computers and people, to erase or
blur the boundary between man and machine, is troubling. It s not just that we detect in their
enthusiasm a disturbing misanthropy Hillis dismisses the human body as the monkey that
walks around, while Marvin Minsky, the former director of MIT s artificial intelligence
program, calls the human brain a bloody mess of organic matter it s also that we naturally
sense in their quest a threat to our integrity as freethinking individuals. Even Bill Gates finds the
concept discomforting. In a 2005 talk in Singapore, he discussed the possibility of connecting
people s bodies and brains directly to computers. One of his Microsoft colleagues, he told the
audience, always says to me, I m ready, plug me in. But Gates said that he was wary of the
idea: I don t feel quite the same way. I m happy to have the computer over there and I m over
here.
In addition to finding the prospect of being turned into computer-enhanced cyborgs
unsettling, we also tend to be skeptical of the idea. It seems far-fetched, even ludicrous like
something out of a particularly fanciful piece of science fiction. Here, though, we part company
with Gates. In that same speech, he made it clear that he believes the blending of computers and
people is inevitable, that we will, in the foreseeable future, come to be augmented by digital
processors and software. We will have those capabilities, he declared. And evidence suggests
that Microsoft, like Google, aims to be a pioneer in creating human computer interfaces for
commercial gain. In 2004, the company was granted a patent for a method and apparatus for
transmitting power and data using the human body. In its filing, Microsoft described how it is
developing technology that will turn skin into a new kind of electrical conduit, or bus, that can
be used to connect a network of devices coupled to a single body. It also noted that the
network can be extended by connecting multiple bodies through physical contact [such as] a
handshake. When two or more bodies are connected physically, the linked bodies form one large
bus over which power and/or communications signals can be transmitted.
Microsoft s patent is just one manifestation of the many corporate and academic research
programs that are aimed at merging computers and people and, in particular, at incorporating
human beings more fully into the Internet s computing web. A 2006 study sponsored by the
British government s Office of Science and Innovation surveyed some of the most promising of
these initiatives. In addition to confirming that our bodies are fated to become data-transmission
buses leading to the rise of computing on the human platform the study s authors document
the rapid advances taking place in the melding of the real and virtual worlds. New ambient
displays, they write, promise to make computing ubiquitous, surrounding us with data and
software everywhere we go: In ubiquitous computing, the physical location of data and
processing power is not apparent to the user. Rather, information is made available to the user in
a transparent and contextually relevant manner. Within ten years, we won t even have to use
keystrokes and mouse clicks to tell computers what we want them to do. There will be new
ways of interacting with computers in which delegated systems perform tasks proactively on
users behalf, tuned precisely to the momentary requirements of time and place.
The researchers also predict that the Google founders dream of a direct link between the
brain and the Internet should become a reality by 2020. That s when we re likely to see the first
physical neural interface, providing a direct connection between a human or animal brain and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl exclamation.htw.pl
search engine would understand everything in the world. A year later, in February 2007, he told
a group of scientists that Google has a team of employees who are really trying to build an
artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale. The fulfillment of their goal, he said, is not
as far off as people think.
In taking a transcendental view of information technology, seeing it as a way to
overcome what they perceive to be the physical limitations of the human brain, Brin and Page
are expressing a desire that has long been a hallmark of the mathematicians and computer
scientists who have devoted themselves to the creation of artificial intelligence. It s a desire that,
as David Noble notes in The Religion of Technology, can be traced all the way back to the
seventeenth-century French philosopher Ren Descartes, who argued that the body is always a
hindrance to the mind in its thinking and saw in mathematics a model for pure understanding.
The Cartesian ideal runs through the work of mathematicians like George Boole, Alfred North
Whitehead, and Alan Turing, whose breakthroughs in algebraic logic set the stage for the modern
binary computer.
In her 1979 book Machines Who Think, Pamela McCorduck wrote that artificial
intelligence promises to provide an extension of those human capacities we value most. She
quoted MIT professor Edward Fredkin s claim that artificial intelligence is the next step in
evolution. Danny Hillis, whose pioneering work in parallel computing paved the way for
Google s systems, argued in a 1992 interview that AI could provide a means of remedying man s
mental shortcomings, of fixing the bugs left over history, back from when we were animals,
and lead to the creation of beings who are better than us. In Reinventing Humanity, a 2006
article, the acclaimed inventor and author Ray Kurzweil predicted that artificial intelligence will
vastly exceed biological intelligence by the mid-2040s, resulting in a world where there is no
distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality.
To most of us, the desire of the AI advocates to merge computers and people, to erase or
blur the boundary between man and machine, is troubling. It s not just that we detect in their
enthusiasm a disturbing misanthropy Hillis dismisses the human body as the monkey that
walks around, while Marvin Minsky, the former director of MIT s artificial intelligence
program, calls the human brain a bloody mess of organic matter it s also that we naturally
sense in their quest a threat to our integrity as freethinking individuals. Even Bill Gates finds the
concept discomforting. In a 2005 talk in Singapore, he discussed the possibility of connecting
people s bodies and brains directly to computers. One of his Microsoft colleagues, he told the
audience, always says to me, I m ready, plug me in. But Gates said that he was wary of the
idea: I don t feel quite the same way. I m happy to have the computer over there and I m over
here.
In addition to finding the prospect of being turned into computer-enhanced cyborgs
unsettling, we also tend to be skeptical of the idea. It seems far-fetched, even ludicrous like
something out of a particularly fanciful piece of science fiction. Here, though, we part company
with Gates. In that same speech, he made it clear that he believes the blending of computers and
people is inevitable, that we will, in the foreseeable future, come to be augmented by digital
processors and software. We will have those capabilities, he declared. And evidence suggests
that Microsoft, like Google, aims to be a pioneer in creating human computer interfaces for
commercial gain. In 2004, the company was granted a patent for a method and apparatus for
transmitting power and data using the human body. In its filing, Microsoft described how it is
developing technology that will turn skin into a new kind of electrical conduit, or bus, that can
be used to connect a network of devices coupled to a single body. It also noted that the
network can be extended by connecting multiple bodies through physical contact [such as] a
handshake. When two or more bodies are connected physically, the linked bodies form one large
bus over which power and/or communications signals can be transmitted.
Microsoft s patent is just one manifestation of the many corporate and academic research
programs that are aimed at merging computers and people and, in particular, at incorporating
human beings more fully into the Internet s computing web. A 2006 study sponsored by the
British government s Office of Science and Innovation surveyed some of the most promising of
these initiatives. In addition to confirming that our bodies are fated to become data-transmission
buses leading to the rise of computing on the human platform the study s authors document
the rapid advances taking place in the melding of the real and virtual worlds. New ambient
displays, they write, promise to make computing ubiquitous, surrounding us with data and
software everywhere we go: In ubiquitous computing, the physical location of data and
processing power is not apparent to the user. Rather, information is made available to the user in
a transparent and contextually relevant manner. Within ten years, we won t even have to use
keystrokes and mouse clicks to tell computers what we want them to do. There will be new
ways of interacting with computers in which delegated systems perform tasks proactively on
users behalf, tuned precisely to the momentary requirements of time and place.
The researchers also predict that the Google founders dream of a direct link between the
brain and the Internet should become a reality by 2020. That s when we re likely to see the first
physical neural interface, providing a direct connection between a human or animal brain and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]