12 Events That Will Change Everything

. . . in fairly simple lay language.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=interactive-12-events#

 

That was really interesting. I particularly enjoyed the asteroid collision, sounds of space and the room-temperature superconductors. I've always been skeptical of the artificial intelligence thing, but I don't know enough about it to not be just a little scared

I'm surprised there was no mention of peak oil.

 

Interesting ........thanks for posting.

 

The polar meltdown part where it shows a shrinking U.S reminds me of this guy's hairline.

 

Artificial intelligence....

Has no one seen the Matrix?!?!?!


>.<

 

Or the Terminator or Irobot. It never ends well for us lol.

 

Not sure if you get Jeopardy in Australia, but next month there will be competition between two of the greatest players on the show and an IBM designed supercomputer who apparently has 200 million pages of information in its database.

A recent practice round:

[YOUTUBE]12rNbGf2Wwo[/YOUTUBE]

 

I hope I remember to watch. Details on which date:

http://www.courierpostonline.com/ar...son-IBM-computer-wins-Jeopardy-practice-round



The man versus machine Jeopardy! competition will air Feb. 14-16, in two full matches to be filmed today in Yorktown.

 

I used the pronoun "who" in reference to the computer, something typically reserved for people instead of the determiner "which."

 

To Satyr: Good find.

For anyone interested in the overview, here are two videos to complement the recent post.

[YOUTUBE]_1c7s7-3fXI[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]3G2H3DZ8rNc[/YOUTUBE]

 

When I said I was skeptical, I didn't mean skeptical that it was possible or likely to become mainstream, but skeptical that AI would "take over" or turn against humans. I mean.. at the end of the day, they're programmed BY humans, right?

But that's why I said I don't know enough about it to say it's not possible.

 

We're still in that stage where A.I. is still lacking self-awareness of self-importance and ego. When that happens, which will be a long time from here, expect the future to take a more cyber-punk turn.

 

I just can't get my head around a machine feeling emotion.

 

Are you scared that it will be similar to I-Robot?

 

Haven't seen it.

 

It's a decent movie. Basically, robots develop emotions with their advanced mindsets. Another movie would be A.I..

 

You're a machine with feelings. Organic in nature but programed the same way machines are programed. The only real difference is robots can actuallly see and touch their creators.

 

It would be nice if they continue to explore great things to do with AI- in medicine, defense, transportation, border control, education (as teachers), banking and so forth, rather than putting them on Jeoperdoy to answer random useless mind numbing questions.

 

It seems to me that artificial intelligence might evolve the same way we did with increasingly higher levels of self-awareness, perhaps without taking so long to go from fire to electricity or communicative grunts to literature.

If deployed as tools for helping to solve our various environmental, economic, and social problems, it might conclude that since the common variable behind every human problem is us, Earth would be better off without people.

And yes computers are programmed by us, much in the way that we've been programmed by nature. One need only think of how we've repaid the natural world for our existence to ponder the level of gratitude future generations of intelligent machines might show us?

 

Reminder: The IBM Jeopardy showdown starts Monday.

Practice against Watson yourself.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/16/magazine/watson-trivia-game.html

I got 15/30. My worst categories were "You've Got Baggage" (1/5) and "Historic Fashion" (0/5).