Word: raying
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...meet them sooner than even these visionaries imagine. Within the next few weeks, in Kyoto, Japan, an ecobiologist and radically bottom-up computer theorist named Tom Ray will initiate an open-ended experiment he calls a "digital biodiversity reserve." A single, tiny, self-reproducing program will be loosed into a "virtual Internet" spread among hundreds of computers around the world. If all goes as earlier trial runs suggest, Ray's artificial "organisms" will quickly populate the network and begin to evolve...
After that, even Ray doesn't know what will happen. Perhaps the population will reach stasis and stagnate at the level of pond scum. Or perhaps Ray's digital beings will set off down the same sort of evolutionary path our species has traveled, only at electron speed. And if that happens, what then? We may find ourselves face to face with an artificial intelligence so thoroughly immersed in the silicon realm, so distant from our curious, carbon-based concerns, that we cannot even hope to converse with...
...even chess--that behavior no longer seems to require much thought. If anything unites AI's increasingly diverse strategies for building machines that think, however, it's that they all require us to stretch our notions of what human thought really is. "We need to be prepared," warns Ray, "for an intelligence that is very different from...
Indeed, the evidence seemed over-whelming that the world I will graduate into will be one characterized by ever-increasing income inequality and a drop in standards of living. And yet, while studying just a few days ago, a ray of hope shone forth to me from an unlikely source: the otherwise tinder-dry pages of my Ec 10 textbook...
...they were going to use the money. The trial opened with Tucker's attorneys claiming prosecutors had removed one woman because of her race. Federal Judge George Howard Jr. agreed and reinstated the woman, making the jury nine whites and three blacks. After the jury was seated, Prosecutor Ray Jahn described a succession of illegal deals he said began when banker Mr. McDougal made the governor an offer "he couldn't refuse." The McDougals were partners with the Clintons in the Whitewater land development in Arkansas. Chief prosecution witness David Hale says Clinton pressured him to make...