Tuesday, February 15, 2011

A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans


NYTimes

At the dawn of the modern computer era, two Pentagon-financed laboratories bracketed Stanford University. At one laboratory, a small group of scientists and engineers worked to replace the human mind, while at the other, a similar group worked to augment it.

In 1963 the mathematician-turned-computer scientist John McCarthy started the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The researchers believed that it would take only a decade to create a thinking machine.

Also that year the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart formed what would become the Augmentation Research Center to pursue a radically different goal — designing a computing system that would instead “bootstrap” the human intelligence of small groups of scientists and engineers. [...]

1 comment:

  1. The belief that computers can think stems from the converse belief that people are computers. A computer cannot see or hear! Einayim lahem velo yiru. The brain is an interface between the person and external reality. The computer is simply a collection of 1's and 0's which is programmed to act in a way that is meaningfull to humans.

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