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Our favourites www.stackoverflow.com - The ultimate in responsive and definitive help for your programming problemswww.mobivox.com/ - Simple to implement phone innovation. Phone one number, say the name of who you want to ring and the system connects you. Your address book is managed online and the call charges are free for Skype and cheap worldwide. Try it, we have. It's a great idea. sketchup.google.com - 'Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create, modify and share 3D models. It's easier to learn than other 3D modeling programs, which is why so many people are already using it.' - Great to visualise your ideas. Featured Article So, you're looking at your computer. You're probably skim reading this bit of writing just in order to get this email read. You are clearly the brightest part of the relationship between you and your computer. Will this annoying, humming Orac-like box eventually become more intelligent than you? What is the Singularity, why should I know about it and what's it got to do with Black Holes?The theory goes, that once computers have greater intelligence than you, they will conceive of better computer systems than we could ever imagine, and those better systems could in turn conceive of even more power. A self-re-enforcing cycle will have begun, an event horizon which we cannot see beyond because of our limited, mere-human understanding! Now for some skepticism. Just like some software developers will always say 6-8 weeks when they don't know how to do something, the 'Singularity' is always some 30 years away. I do not believe in the Singularity. Here's why: 1. Human intelligence and creative ability is understood far less than that in computer systems, by a huge factor. We glibly talk about computers being more intelligent than man without knowing what man's intelligence is. Computers have for decades been better at manipulating numbers than us, so in that test, they have been more intelligent for years. To be more intelligent must they be more intelligent in all things? Or, are there some key things they must be better at? 2. Artificial Intelligence has made no real improvement for years. If artificial intelligence programmers were just about to create a system more intelligent than you, then the simple application of voice recognition on your phone would work, right? I suspect the big gains in AI have already been made and AI does not produce machines that can in any way think like you. The closest we programmers get is clippy(!), surely the AI proponents have learnt their lesson!? 3. AI believers will often talk about the Turing Test and point to this as to whether we should treat the computer as alive or not. We have AI systems which have greater intelligence than certain insects, or certainly bacteria. Are these systems alive in the same sense as the insects? Clearly not. Then, if such an unfeasible thing as a computer that is more intelligent than a human, were possible, would it somehow become alive where the less capable AI system is not? Is this purely a judgement call? No, the computer is not alive and nor is the software. Less intelligent people are not less alive than more intelligent ones. To say so is to denigrate humanity and try to fit it into a rather inhumane little box (was that rant? - Ed). There could be some fundamental reason why AI will never exceed human intelligence, or perhaps the Singularity will always remain 30 years away; or perhaps the AI proponants are right, but they've got a heck of a lot of work to do to convince me. If you're an AI believer, or if you'd like a human-respecting computer system for your organisation, we'd love to hear from you.
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