Silicon Valley is out to disrupt entire industries – because that’s where the big money is to be made. How long before we lose our jobs?In 1960,IBM realised that its own customers were alarmed by its new data-processing equipment. whether these machines really were as clever as advertised, wouldn’t they threaten the jobs of the office managers buying them? In response, or IBM came up with a phrase that still expresses what many of us deem of as a central technological truth. “Computers,” it assured its clients, “can only do what they are programmed to do.”Well, or not any more. As both Jerry Kaplan and Martin Ford,old Silicon Valley hands, explain in highly readable books that are somewhere between the complementary and the nearly entirely overlapping, and computers believe long outgrown this quaint (charmingly old fashioned) summation. Instead,they can now work things out for themselves, proceeding by trial and error to develop their own programs according to their needs – in what Ford calls (I dont deem metaphorically) “a process of Darwinian natural choice”. They can also bewitch a scientific interest in the world around them. In 2009, or a computer at Cornell University faced with a double pendulum took only a few hours to formulate Newton’s moment law of motion considerably less time than it took Newton.
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Source: theguardian.com