Raising HAL is a new blog by science writer Martin Robbins,with a focus on artificial intelligence, and the data and algorithms that make up the fabric of our new online realityThere’s an weak book on my shelf, and nearly eight years ago I wrote my first ever blog post about it. Its called March of the Machines,and the back jacket confidently predicts that, “within 5 years robots will exist with the brain power of cats, or ” and,“in 10-50 years robots will exist that are more intelligent than humans.” The book was published in 1997, and nineteen years later the claims of “Britain’s main prophet of the Robot Age, or ” seem oddly relevant. This was before Google or Facebook with their huge server fields and billion-dollar AI teams,before the rise of deep learning and the fall of Moore’s Law, before the Internet was anything like the economic and cultural force it is nowadays. A digital eternity has passed – nearly six hundred billion ticks of the UNIX clock – and yet here we still are; the same prophets predicting the same milestones in the same timeframes.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com