Mind Matters: Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence - Hardcover

Hogan, James P.

 
9780345412409: Mind Matters: Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345412400 ISBN 13: 9780345412409
Verlag: Del Rey, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Chronicles the technological accomplishments leading to the development of artificial intelligence and assesses the social, political, and psychological implications of this technical breakthrough

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James P. Hogan was born in London in 1941 and educated at the Cardinal Vaughan Grammar School, Kensington. He studied general engineering at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, subsequently specializing in electronics and digital systems. In mid-1977 he moved from England to the United States to become a Senior Sales Training Consultant, concentrating on the application of minicomputers in science and research, for DEC. At the end of 1979, Hogan opted to write full time.

Aus dem Klappentext

hess Champion Garry Kasparov lost the now-famous rematch against IBM's chess-playing computer Deep Blue last year, millions were riveted. When NASA mounted its historic mission to Mars, the world watched spellbound as a sophisticated mechanical device rolled across the surface of the red planet, taking photographs and analyzing rock samples. Consequently, these events stirred renewed speculation about one of modern science's most fascinating, and haunting, pursuits--the creation of a machine with a mind.<br><br>While the likes of HAL, the sentient, conversant computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the android "replicants" of Blade Runner have mainly kept Artificial Intelligence a purely science-fictional concept in the public eye, the quest to synthesize thought has been very much a reality for decades--and not without striking successes. From the pioneering experiments in "cybernetics" of the 1940s to the digital computers and robot prototypes developed by Carnegie Mellon Un

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You're feeling refreshed and looking forward to dinner with your friends by
the time you arrive at the restaurant. The car's built-in chauffeur
brought you to the door using its onboard database, checking along the way
with the city traffic net for changing conditions. It's a smooth and
relaxed driver, easy on passengers' nerves. Constantly communicating with
the other vehicles around it, it never has to hit the brakes for a short
stop or sudden lane-jumper, won't misread the speed of oncoming traffic at
an intersection, and doesn't get walled off from turn lanes or exit ramps.
It ferries the children where they need to go, talks to satellites if it
needs directions, and takes itself to the shop when service is due. When
it drops you off, you tell it to go and find a parking spot and come back
at nine. It reminds you that you have a package to be collected from a
store just a mile away and asks if you'd like it picked up while the car
has some free time.

The vice president in charge of legal affairs at Trans Global Airlines is
puzzled. At the last operational management meeting, a report concerning
an outbreak of a strange form of neck rash among some of the company's
flight attendants was flagged for priority action, but the preliminary
checks run by the medical people have thrown up nothing. The rash takes a
distinctive bright-red form with mild soreness and itching, yet none of the
standard records describe anything resembling it. The curious thing is
that the victims are all New York-, Washington-, San Francisco-, or Los
Angeles-based, which at first suggested something infectious being carried
around the country, originating at one of those locations. This now seems
unlikely since a general spread would be predicted, but nothing has been
observed at any of the intermediate hubs. Dietary contamination seems
unlikely since only flight-crew members are affected, while the absence of
anything comparable among passengers or other members of the general public
seems to rule out local geographical or environmental factors. Baffled,
the VP and the medical director consult once more with the corporation's
Integrated Information Manager (I2M) via a terminal in the legal
department's offices. The only fact that the system finds to remark upon
that didn't seem worth mentioning before is that the rashes all occurred on
the left side of the neck. Is there any reason why that might be
significant? Neither of the executives can think of one. I2M ruminates
some more and then comes across an obscure item in FAA regulations that
shows a correlation: an extra set of safety rules applied to all the flight
numbers that the affected cabin crew members were working on. Could that
be significant? The medical director shakes his head and seems a trifle
impatient. Rashes don't have anything to do with safety rules. The VP,
however, is curious and asks what was different about those flights. The
machine thinks about it, studies the destinations, and notes among other
things that the routes, to some degree at least, all lay over water. And
the mystery is soon solved. For flights over extended stretches of water,
the safety demonstration included putting on inflatable life jackets. The
life-jacket manufacturer had recently changed to a new type of red ink for
the stenciled markers, and the ink was failing to cure properly. The
itching and soreness the victims experienced were from the scratching
induced in response to the tacky ink.

To the robot spacecraft approaching from space, the asteroid--one of the
countless minor planets circling the sun in a belt between the orbits of
Mars and Jupiter--looks somewhat like an elongated, lumpy potato. Seventy
miles long and thirty or so across the middle, it's of a type known as
"carbonaceous chrondites," which means that in addition to rocky minerals
and metals it also contains ice and about 5 percent of a tarry hydrocarbon
substance called kerogen. Kerogen, sometimes described as "condensed
primeval soup," is formed from elements such as carbon that places like the
moon lack, and forms the basis of organic compounds. Five percent may not
sound like a lot, but it still works out at a cool 50 billion tons, or
somewhere around three hundred times the annual production of organic
chemicals in the United States. The craft lands and disembarks a crew of
tracked, legged, and wheeled surveyor and mining robots that spread out
across the surface and commence delivering ores and other materials back to
the central site, where other machines have begun the construction of a
nuclear-fusion-powered materials extraction and processing plant. A
parts-making facility is added next, followed by a parts-assembly facility,
and stage by stage the plant grows itself into a fully equipped
general-purpose factory complete with its own control computers carrying
programs copied from the ship. The factory then starts making more robots.
When a critical size is reached, a mixed robot workforce detaches itself
from the main center of activity and migrates a short distance across the
surface to build a second factory, a replica of the first. Third- and
fourth-generation factories soon follow. When each has spawned its
assigned number of descendant factories, it stops reproducing and switches
to a production mode, producing and stockpiling materials and products for
eventual shipment to Earth or other parts of the solar system. In time,
this self-replicating pattern will spread to transform the entire asteroid
surface--about equal in size to the state of Massachusetts--into a totally
automated manufacturing complex dedicated to supplying humanity's expanding
civilization from local resources. In a sense, the asteroid could be
thought of as being consumed by mechanical, remote-directed digestive
enzymes sent out from three-hundred-million-mile-distant Earth.

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Verlag
Del Rey
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345412400
ISBN 13 
9780345412409
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
381
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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