In case you weren't aware, HAL (the talking computer in Stanley Kubrick's
film "2001") was "born" on January 12, 1997. In honor
of this event in virtual history, Film Scouts talked to a couple of scientists
about HAL and the possibility of building him today. We would love to hear
from others about your thoughts on HAL - not necessarily technical - and
your responses will be collected and posted here, as a kind of birthday
card collection.
"...Today some guys figure they would build it out of a local network
of interconnected PC chips.
The problem as I see it is not the CPU power (that we can build today) but
the accumulation and accessing of the stored knowledge - that's hard. There
is/was a project trying to create a large knowledge repository, I'm not
sure if that's still going on. I'd guess we'd need a major paradigm shift
to get to where HAL is; something on the order of a biologically based neural
net - heck, after 2 years of training, the average toddler can out-think
most AI programs." -Marc Pucci, Bellcore
"Arthur C. Clarke has a remarkable record of predicting new technologies.
The ideas of a computer monitoring and controlling a complex spaceship,
using multiple graphical displays to present information, and especially
having a "user friendly" interface were astounding in the late
60's. Perhaps by 2001 we will have the technology to build a version of
HAL. There would be some differences in the implementation, e.g., a more
distributed architecture of embedded processors and object-oriented code,
but the basic monitor and control functions of HAL could be achieved. The
control computer hardware would certainly be much smaller than the HAL9000
in the movie. The real question is whether the user interface could be given
a believable personality. Today, there are some AI programs that can carry
on a 'conversation' with a person with a very impressive level of complexity
and 'realness'. In a few years (2001) it may be very difficult to tell whether
you're talking to carbon or silicon." - Peter R. Backus, SETI Institute
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