It was funny to found Skynet & John Connor references in the readers comments.
It's also pretty funny that if someone makes/invents a system with Skynet capabilities, there is a posibility that they will name it Skynet. Thus making the terminator series a self fulfilling prophecy!!!!
What was the last major catastrophe? Oh, yeah, we could monitor for tsunamis.
What's a common problem people have? Oh, yeah, we could flag bad produce at the store (not even sure what that means...).
What do people expect? Oh, yeah, we can make them smaller and faster.
The real value sees to be decision-making. Rather than yes/no, which Von Neumann machines do well, these answer "I think so"/"I don't think so". Should be fun to watch, and I hope I get to try coding against one some day. I'm sure that will be a far more mind-altering experience than learning ruby. :)
seeing these kinds of chips get implemented into other domains would be really interesting too (and comparing them against their traditional counter parts), like rapid stock trading machines, or second opinion machines at the doctor's office (hopefully never the only decision maker) and more broadly, just strategy planning.
I think Watson would make a better primary diagnostic tool than most doctors, but there is an interesting question about decisions. There are so many variables involved in medicine that having something that can actually synthesize all of them seems like it would be a net positive, but I'm not sure what it would take for me to feel comfortable about the machine making a decision on my treatment. I can't imagine the time won't come (during my life) where diagnostics and treatment can be done by machine.
This could be a breakthrough technology for robotics and AI. For years it has looked liked a new computer architecture would be required to let robots make all of the complex decisions in real-time that humans take for granted, especially in the realm of perception.
If these chips can do what they say they can (well), I can't wait to see how they change robotics!
it starts with the words- " new generation of chip", "supercomputing", " significant step" and ends with "grocer's glove".In any case, these IBM Research guys didn't say a word about robots, space ships, etc. I think it's just noise. But they know how to raise money $21m it's not a joke.
After I read this article I started thinking about Kurzweil's documentary, Singularity. How much longer before we can all become immortal Cyborgs? Is singularity as near as he predicts? (notice the capital C in Cyborg. PWND.)
