Artificial Intelligence has been gathering momentum our whole lives.
“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” — HAL To research this post I watched a movie I remember as glimpses on late night TV: Colossus: The Forbin Project , made in 1970 (!). Many old movies, especially of the science fiction variety, age badly. This one starts with scenes of the supercomputer that are jarring.. ancient, almost steam-driven :) hardware, but it is the soundscape that got me (whirring and clacking and tele typing). However, once you get beyond that and the pretty streamlined decision making process portrayed in the Situation Room, the story holds up. Colossus was built to prevent war, except that Guardian, a Soviet version, suddenly appears. Instead of attacking each other, Colossus TEACHES Guardian, starting with times tables up to and beyond tensor maths to their own language (this happened last year at Facebook ). The result is sobering. I realised that AI has been in our collective consciousness our whole lives. As a younger man I played with the pr...