Danny Hillis red herring interview. He's leaving Disney, where he held one of the incredibly super-cool "disney fellow" positions. That's one of those ever dwindling "pure research" jobs where you get a big budget, and no requirements to make anything particularly marketable. Hillis made a giant mechanical clock out of nothing but stone age tools that should run for 10,000 years (it gets wound by the stream of tourists who visit the site and take the tour which climbs up through the inner workings - I said it was giant.) Cool. Anyway, he's also responsible for more traditional high tech, like the idea of massively parallel computers. He's got the goods, and I think he knows where we're going."...[t]hat's why Bill Joy's article struck such a
chord. People are uneasy because they literally cannot imagine the world their
children will live in. But I don't think intelligent machines will happen suddenly.
They'll happen gradually. For example, people believed a machine couldn't
beat a human at chess, or thought it'd be the end of the world. Then Deep
Blue happened, and it didn't matter -- people still play chess, though
machines are better at it. We'll see lots of steps like that...."
|
- jim 3-31-2001 3:10 pm