What do we mean by AI? By the start of the 21st century it was clear that encoding a set of behavioral rules did not constitute intelligence. Despite the increasingly complex decision trees built into expert systems, and the variety of responses that could simulate human interaction, nothing even close to resembling a thinking machine was on the horizon; the claims of prominent researchers in the mid-20th century that the problem was substantially solved were proved optimistic. It was not until the middle part of the 21st century that meaningful progress was made, enabled by the convergence of three critical disciplines. The final scaling of planar semiconductor technology reached its zenith, culminating in trillion transistor chips with thousands of processor cores and gigabytes of on-board memory. Coupled with unprecedented data storage capacity, entire simulated 3D worlds were being created across the connected globe, building the fledgling infrastructure that would eventually…
Tag: How Deep the Quantum Well
How Deep the Quantum Well Near-Future Science Fiction
I completed my first science fiction novel this summer and went the self-publishing route. It was great fun writing it, with a lot of help and encouragement from my friends Tim and Tari, not to mention a fair amount of patience from my family as I spent long hours on the back patio typing away on the laptop. I also went to a writer’s workshop in Tucson during the course of the project, which was quite interesting. The highlight of the event for me was sitting with a bunch of strangers, one of whom was an elderly lady with an old Polaroid of herself standing with John Wayne. She had quite a story to tell of sneaking into the Old Tucson studios wearing a badge she had borrowed from a friend who worked there. Her goal, of course, was to meet the Duke, filming “Rio Bravo”, which she eventually managed,…