If artificially intelligent machines become smarter than humans, who will set the goals they seek to achieve?
A pioneer of computer science, Ada Lovelace created the very first computer program in the mid-1800s and also foresaw the digital future.
In this very small volume of messed-up corroded metal you have packed in there enough knowledge to fill several books telling us about ancient technology, ancient science and the way these interacted with the broader culture of the time.
Even the most powerful tech companies and entrepreneurs are freely sharing the code underlying their latest technologies. They recognize this will accelerate not only the progress of technology as a whole, but their own progress as well. It’s altruism with self-interest. And it’s how the tech world now works.
It wasn’t until almost a century after Boole’s pioneering work that the world caught up. Both Victor Shestakov at Moscow State University in 1935 and Claude Shannon at MIT in 1937 proposed using Boolean logic to design electrical switches, the latter’s work paving the way for a major shift in electrical engineering in the USA. By late 1948, Shannon had introduced what we now know as information theory, and digital computers soon followed.
Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?
That's what computers are really good at, relentless grinding. I can't call it intelligence, and I can call it artificial intelligence only in the sense that an inflatable palm is an artificial tree. I realize that we do have to call it something, though, but the term "artificial intelligence" probably confuses more than it illuminates.
An experimental browser shows how peer-to-peer technology can serve up entire websites, not just individual files.
Coprocessors and a neural network supercomputer may follow.
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