MSN Tech & Gadgests has a slide show presentation of sci-fi scenarios "that will come true" : biometrics (already true), space tourism (already barely true), the holodeck (unlikely as shown on Star Trek, but VR environments using holography are likely), and domestic robots (already true, care to Roomba?) There's one more: "self-aware computers." That's what the headline says, but the text below says "...machines driven by artificial intelligence will, within 15 years or so, be handling many routine tasks." Hello? "Artificial intelligence" is not the same as "self-aware computers." Computers already simulate intelligence without being "self-aware." The whole self-awareness thing, Hal 9000 style, is extremely unlikely, though predicted by very smart people. Nobody's smart about everything, and my real difficulty with this is that we don't know enough about "awareness" to know how to create it in a computer, which is essentially a bunch of switches. How we get from switches that simulate logic via sophisticated human-generated programming to a state of "self-awareness" I don't get. If we make enough maps, and we make them increasingly sophisticated, do they become "the territory"?
Nobody knows nothin'
Is knowledge a rut that stymies innovation?
Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.
I've had a couple of situations of late where I responded to academics on email lists and thought, too little jargon, I'm going to sound like a dumbass. I can't do jargon well, though, because I've worked so hard to think, and write, clearly. And I've come to realize, after years of thinking about thinking, that nobody's smart about everything and many outsmart themselves. Good piece about this in the the New York Times.[Link]