The next big jump in computing, potentially as important as the jump that created the programmable electronic computer, must be inspired by biology … It may be that the successor to that type of machine is gestating far from the hotbeds of computerdom, in an obscure corner of the chemical business: a field called process control … Such computers will not be much like human-programmed digital computers … They will be less like the idiots that digital boxes are now, utterly dependent on flawless programming, and more like dogs: trainable, but with an inherent set of instincts and abilities, herding our processes and reactions and systems like a border collie runs a flock of sheep.
Predictor: Gruber, Michael
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Michael Gruber writes: ”Despite the enormous progress made in the electronic digital computer, the box on your desk – or on your lap, or in your pocket – is the same sort of machine as the 50-year-old room-sized monster. It manipulates binary code the way it has been programmed to do. Computers of this type will become faster and more powerful for a time, but there are already signs they are approaching limits in both hardware and software. Even without these limits, digital computers of any conceivable power will have difficulty accomplishing seemingly simple tasks. A big machine capable of running a space mission fails completely when asked to pick a face from a crowd or to drive a robot across a room full of obstacles. These sorts of problems have already been solved in nature, in an infinite variety of ways, by the associations of neurons directing living creatures. The next big jump in computing, potentially as important as the jump that created the programmable electronic computer, must be inspired by biology … It may be that the successor to that type of machine is gestating far from the hotbeds of computerdom, in an obscure corner of the chemical business: a field called process control … It may be that artificial intelligence will be developed the same way that nature developed the real thing – through evolution, layer upon layer, from the simple to the complex. Such computers will not be much like human-programmed digital computers. They will be able to do things that digital machines cannot do easily, or cannot do at all, just as digital computers can do things that organic brains can’t pull off. Such computers will not be free-standing boxes, at least at first, but will be tied into technology, giving to industrial processes the sort of homeostatic control exhibited by living beings. They will be less like the idiots that digital boxes are now, utterly dependent on flawless programming, and more like dogs: trainable, but with an inherent set of instincts and abilities, herding our processes and reactions and systems like a border collie runs a flock of sheep.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Neurobotics: The Future of Computing May Be Gestating – Not in Computer Labs, But in an Obscure Discipline Called Process Control, Where Scientists Have Discovered That a Little Smear of Rat Brain Can Solve One of the Big Problems in Chemical Engineering
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/neurobotics_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney