Ray Kurzweil, a successful inventor and highly progressive thinker, believes that we are nearing a point where computers will be much more intelligent than humans. During this shift, Kurzweil also says that machines will be so smart, they will be able to learn on their own and fix their own problems. He calls this: Singularity.
Does anyone remember at the football game against Nebraska when the brand new big screens weren't working? Well, it took the athletic department well into the second half of the game to get them working like they're supposed to. Kurzweil thinks that in the near future, these monitors will know that there is a problem and fix it on its own. It will be like a doctor, diagnosing the issue, and a repairman, replacing it to normal functionality.
His ideas are pretty amazing and surely revolutionary, but I can definitely imagine a day when the things he says are true.
Click here to read more about singularity: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.html
And here to watch a video: http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,784887564001_2048332,00.html
Me not so much. We've been predicting at a technological "singularity" for a long time. It's always turned out false. Here's our Steampunk example: The Titanic (actually, the whole Olympic class of vessel) was thought to be the singularity of ship design. It arrived in the time when all the great thinkers were predicting the "final triumph of mankind's technology over nature". Of course, as we all know, once the Titanic set sail we never had to worry about updating ship technology or nature proving too much for that tech ever again.
ReplyDeleteExcept oh wait, we did: 4 days later!
I agree that we overestimate our future technological breakthroughs in some sense but the progress that was made in the past few years have been extraordinary. Cell phones have become computers, and, as we saw in class, people are becoming cyborgs with robot-like appendages. What the future is may not be this crazy but having self diagnosing machines does not seem too far fetched.
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