WHEN THINGS START TO THINK | Preface
May 15, 2003
- Author:
- Neil Gershenfeld
- Published:
- Henry Holt & Company, 1999
e-book: When Things Start to Think
- Author:
- Neil Gershenfeld
- Published:
- Henry Holt & Company, 1999
The demise of the book has been planned for centuries. This came first by fiat, with bannings and burnings, and more recently by design, with new media promising to make old books obsolete. Today’s book-of-the-future is the CD-ROM, offering video and sounds and cross-references to enhance ordinary text. Who would ever want to go back to reading a book that just has words? cross-references to enhance ordinary text. Who would ever want to go back to reading a book that just has words?…
- Author:
- Neil Gershenfeld
- Published:
- Henry Holt & Company, 1999
- Author:
- Neil Gershenfeld
Originally published by Henry Holt and Company 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 15, 2003.
Steve Mann was one of the Media Lab’s best-dressed students. It’s easy to recognize Steve because you don’t see him; you see his computer. His eyes are hidden behind a visor containing small display screens. He looks out through a pair of cameras, which are connected to his displays through a fanny pack full of electronics strapped around his waist. Most of the time the cameras are mounted in front of his eye, but when he rides a bicycle he finds that it’s helpful to have one of his electronic eyes looking backward so he can see approaching traffic, or in a crowd he likes to move an eye down to his feet to help him see where he’s walking.
- Author:
- Neil Gershenfeld
Originally published by Henry Holt and Company 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 15, 2003.
Barings Bank was founded in 1762. In its long history it helped to finance the Louisiana Purchase (providing money Napoleon needed to keep fighting his wars), and counted the Queen among its loyal customers. In January of 1995 a twenty-eight-year-old trader for Barings in Singapore, Nick Leeson, lost most of what eventually proved to be $1.4 billion by trading futures in the Japanese Nikkei Index. That was twice the bank’s available capital; by February the bank had folded, and in March it was sold to the Dutch bank ING for £1.
- Author:
- Neil Gershenfeld
Originally published by Henry Holt and Company 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 15, 2003.
For as long as people have been making machines, they have been trying to make them intelligent. This generally unsuccessful effort has had more of an impact on our own ideas about intelligence and our place in the world than on the machines’ ability to reason. The few real successes have come about either by cheating, or by appearing to. In fact, the profound consequences of the most mundane approaches to making machines smart point to the most important lesson that we must learn for them to be able to learn: intelligence is connected with experience. We need all of our senses to make sense of the world, and so do computers.