World Wide Computer on Horizon

I found a very interesting article on the direction we might be headed with computers and the internet. What is your take on this? I hope I don't get any "skynet" replies.


www.usatoday.com...

Sounds like he's talking about AJAX meets distributed computing spawning AI.

Plausible. The change has already begun. I don't know if it will eventually lead to the birth of AI, though.

Sounds to me like a bit of wishful thinking from various IT companies combined with some economic-benefits-based salesmanship. I'm fairly certain some of the predictions in the article will happen though, because individual companies will benefit from the 'economics of scale'.

As far as AI, I seriously doubt that digital techniques will ever lead to what is generally seen by the public as AI. Digital is too exacting to be able to effectively communicate with humans on their level. Oh, we may someday see advances towards AI coming from the digital world, but not complete 'Jetsons' style AI.

Alas, no Rosie yet...

TheRedneck

Roll on the day, when the internet becomes an entity like they say, but also will be able to hold a conversation with you on any subject, collecting the data from the internet for its own intelligence.

Surely that is the goal of the internet. I wonder how it will become a reality in this world though.

Im a big fan of Ray Kurzweil's book 'The age of spiritual machines, when computers exceed human intelligence'

If you've never read any of Kurzweils books or seen his KurzweilAI.net website your missing out. Futurists like this dude, have the best guess for how this whole computer driven singularity is going to happen.

I really see Robotics and artificial intelligence programs unifying to be greater than the sum of their parts. Both fields are seeing marvelous advances in this century and It's only just begun. by 2050 we should be far closer to the true birth of a self aware machine. The internet does seem to be the logical method of birth. So much information and such huge computing power. Botnets run by hackers already userp millions of computers to perform tasks. It seems entirely possible that one of the many web based AI's in development today could use similar methods to spread itself across the whole world of networked computers learning from the vast sea of information available to it. Learning how to be more and more like its creators all the time and in time surpassing us as the worlds most significant intelligence. Do your research, there are AI's that have been in development since the early 90's and even though you probably havent heard anything about them, they have come a long long way towards the goal of making a machine that is indistinguishable from a human intellect.

I've seen the movie Ghost in the Shell about 30 times and it just doesnt seem that far fetched to me. Someday a military program with enough intelligence will assert itself and claim self awareness. The puppetmaster.

Anyway, making a computer as smart as a person doesnt seem hard. We have some good techniques for pattern recognition that give us a distinct advantage but in time there will be computer based answers to these problems. The advantage of a computer lies in its ability to accumulate extremely large amounts of data and organize this data into usefull data sets. Just imagine an AI which is expert in every field of science. With all the reasearch ever done in any field available to it. Just imagine the connections this machine would see that we as individuals never realize. The bigger picture. Maybe a physicist has one part of the puzzle and a chemical engineer has another part of the puzzle and a theoretical mathematician has another part of the puzzle but because they are specialized, they never see some of the possibilities that would be apparent to the AI which masters all fields. Add to this the ability of the AI to simulate virtual experimental data to quickly develop a project from theory to real world functionality. A superintelligence of this kind would quickly push every field of study to its physical limits. Taking advantage of this new information would allow us to advance very quickly. Far more quickly than we do currently.

I look forward to that far off time when a benevolent AI takes charge or is given control over the governance of humanity. Because from what I can tell we are incapable of governing ourselves. Just look at the state of the world. We have failed as the stewards of earth. Its time to pass the torch to a higher intelligence before we burn ourselves out.