In 1989, grandmaster Garry Kasparov beat the electronic pants off IBM's chess-playing computer called Deep Thought. But while Kasparov gloated, Deep Thought evolved into Deep Blue, a machine capable of evaluating more than 200 million positions a second. Eight years after their first match, Deep Blue deep-sixed Kasparov, and we basically lost control of our machines. Soon after that, computers launched a surprise nuclear attack, and a small remnant of humanity survived only by fleeing into outer space.(via reader Doug J.)
No -- wait -- that's "Battlestar Galactica." Our conflict against machines has been more pathetic: enslavement by BlackBerrys, iPods, an avalanche of spam, a thicket of PINs we can't remember and patronizing computers that tell us to "listen carefully because our options have changed." Indeed, our options have vanished. Resistance is futile.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Best Start to a Book Review Ever
From Ron Charles's review of The Chess Machine on page BW7 of Sunday's Washington Post:
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3 comments:
Yes, we tend to worry about an I, Robot scenario or some other variant where the machines that take over do so with personality, or for some reason. We are projecting ourselves onto them.
In a more evolutionary model, machines, which can handle more computations per second, will just slowly take over more areas, not from any "desire" to supplant us, but just for efficiency. It's just a niche, and they fit it better than we do. No hard feelings, Jack. While we watch for the enemy machines on the horizon, they are helping us type conversation to each other - as I'm doing here.
After he lost to Deep Blue, Kasparov gave a press conference. Deep Blue didn't, not being clever enough to do such a thing.
AVI:
Well-said! I'm actually not a techno-phobe, but those two paras were too funny not to quote.
Bob-B:
That is, indeed, the ultimate Turing test.
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