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…
Category: Science Fiction
Topics related to the genre of science fiction.
Pulp Fiction Lives On
I must have read the John Carter Martian series back when I was in high school, or maybe junior high, and even then they were old. Now Disney is releasing a movie of one of the stories, complete with the four-armed Tars Tarkas and lovely Dejah Thoris. When I first saw the trailer on television a week or so ago, I was taken by the coolness of the special effects, but didn’t make the connection with Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ characters until near the end. I must admit I’m loving the ability of Hollywood to go back to classic science fiction novels, and armed with an array of CGI technologies, bring even the most unusual characters and settings to life. And with a dozen or so titles in the Martian series, if this first one does well, perhaps we’ll see more of the next world out in our solar system from…
The Future
As a science fiction aficionado, I’ve always been intrigued by speculating about the future. No one has ever got it completely right, but some writers have given us glimpses of what is possible. That future might be bleak or awesome, filled with technological wonders or a desolate, post-apocalyptic disaster. For me, that’s what makes science fiction so fun to read. Depending on your tastes, you can look forward to the coming years with anticipation, or dread the spinning hands of the clock as they mark the passage of the moments we know toward some dimly perceived Armageddon. The reality of those predictions is that they’re never quite right. Some aspects of both the positive and negative appear when the present inevitably collides with the future, and we walk the middle ground, never progressing as fast or far as the futurists would like, and never falling into some form of ultimate…