Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The Rise of the Machines

Back in the days of refrigerator-sized Lisp Machines, one of the people in the AI Research lab was developing a text editor. A text editor that checked your spelling after each "space" and your grammar after each punctuation mark.

That's ridiculous, everyone said, because the whole machine would completely bog down when those checks were made. The project was scrapped.

Flash forward to computing power that makes such spell and grammar checks trivial. This is the sort of exponential change that people like Ray Kurzweil talk about.

Personally I don't think AI will get to the point of "real" intelligence (whatever that is), but will be able to quite convincingly fake it.

And, if instead of refrigerator-sized Lisp Machines we can house the software in machines that look like Tricia Helfer or Summer Glau, count me in.

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