Word: silicon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...baby can do. "It sits there waving its arm around, watching its arm, reaching for things," he says. These are pretty standard tricks for newborn humans, of course, but then Brooks' "baby" (nicknamed Cog) isn't exactly human. It's a vaguely person-shaped concoction of metal, plastic and silicon, with cameras where its eyes should be and eight 32-bit microprocessors for a brain. Cog is an artificially intelligent computer that is trying to learn about the world the way babies do, programming and reprogramming itself through interactions with the people and objects around it. And Brooks, a professor...
...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...
...next thing I learned was that I was not alone. Thirty-five other Internet addresses were targeted last week, ranging from the prestigious president@whitehouse.gov to the evocative rage@us.disarray.com The victims included the New York Times' chief Silicon Valley reporter, two leading hacker magazines, a couple of interns at MTV and a man who once ran a Hell's Angels computer bulletin board. Gene Steinberg, a free-lance writer from Scottsdale, Arizona, is convinced that he made the hit list because he publicly defended America Online on a Usenet newsgroup called alt.aol.sucks...
Four years ago, Bill Clinton got a big boost when a group of Silicon Valley's captains announced their support for him over George Bush. Now, however, cyberexecutives are considering any campaign drive for Clinton to be, well, a virtual goner. Dismissing Clinton's info-superhighway pep talks as showboating, the industry is focusing on a menu of grievances, including increased corporate taxes, burdensome accounting-reform proposals and, most of all, Clinton's failed veto of a law making it easier for companies to prevail in securities-fraud lawsuits. Silicon Valley successfully pressed for a congressional override, maintaining that...
...takes more than nerves of steel to do that. It takes a silicon brain. No human can achieve absolute certainty because no human can be sure to have seen everything. Deep Blue...