On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 6:00 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
They will have the power of today's Watson computer, which is to say, they > will be able to play Jeopardy or diagnose disease far better than any > person. I expect they will also recognize faces and do voice input better > than any person. > This prediction seems very attainable. I think developments along these lines will happen in the next ten to twenty years. Your smartphone may be able to do these things. (And your smartphone will be a tiny little thing.) A related development -- people are predisposed to anthropomorphizing technology. In the same time period, I suppose there will be robots and computer systems that far surpass Siri in mimicking sentient life. There was a highly entertaining movie that came out recently, "Her," that riffed on this idea. All the human data now existing can be stored in about 7 ml of DNA. > Note that much of this storage is not in the molecule itself but in how it's arranged -- epigenetics. This is a fascinating area of biology that focuses on which genes are expressed and to what extent they are. It could hold the key to understanding things like cancer, which studies that focus solely on genetics might not uncover. Eric
