Another significant moment was the day in 1997 when the IBM computer called Deep Blue beat the then world champion Gary Kasparov at chess.
Jeopardy, I'm told, is a different matter, rather more than just one step up in complexity.
The questions are allusive and unstructured, they come from all over. Big Blue's Jeopardy victory was therefore a breakthrough moment for members of what is now known as the artificial intelligence community.
But is the superior number crunching that computers can now routinely carry out real intelligence or simulated artificial intelligence (AI)?
Computers taking over???
Many companies big and small are now pursuing the holy grail of artificial intelligence - at its starkest, thinking machines. Most are shrouding their efforts in secrecy, IBM isn't.
Watson is now being marketed as a tool for people to explore and use. In New York, there's an impressive building near the city's so-called Silicon Alley devoted to demonstrating Watson, and finding uses for its apparent intelligence.
When machines might outstrip humans as thinkers - is making a lot of headlines. But the people closest to it are wary of the claims made by experts such as Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer at Google, that the human race will sometime soon be eclipsed by intelligent machines.
Mr Kurzweil has long been convinced that one year (maybe 2050) computers will have evolved to be as clever as we are. Two years later - following the drum beaten by Moore's Law - they will be twice as clever.
At which stage it would be logical to hand over to them, since they know more than we do, and will continue to improve.
In spite of Mr Kurzweil's concept of this takeover point, which he calls the singularity, most of the other people I've been listening to think that AI is not a fixed threshold point in the evolution of computer power.
But crunching data, and learning from that, is only one of the things that human beings have mastered - to a certain extent.
0 comments:
Post a Comment