Vision Center

Babel Fish uses increasingly dated algorithms – Google Language Tools uses more sophisticated statistical translation, and gets the correct answer.

These days, computers do all the things he said they can’t do (play excellent chess, bridge, draughts, translate languages (Google translate gets that “out of sight, out of mind” translation right), compose music, find the author of Ivanhoe, reliably tell the difference between the moon and a missile, work with incomplete and disorganized data, program themselves, generalize.

They don’t “Squish people with deadly squish rays! Hypnotize nubile girls with horrible mind rays, baby!”, but they do fly around landlocked Central Asian countries, strafing wedding parties (and the occasional terrorist leader).

So, the author of this article has been quite unfair on the science fiction writers and journalists and scientists whom he accuses of nonsense and “soaring” enthusiasm. They were more right than he was.

Now, as others wrote before, it is not that computers have become “smarter” – it is just that programmers (or “EDP Boys” as they were called) have become more proficient at using the ressources at hand, along with the fact that the usable computing power has (and still is -> Moore’s Law) exponentially grown.

“Just as safe or dangerous”? Well yeah, but you won’t get your neck tie caught in the punch card reader. The design evolved away from that peripheral.

And as for “If we held ourselves to a higher standard– if our society encouraged from its citizens a deeper understanding of and more purposeful activities that apply computation– then we would all be much further ahead than we currently are.”

Nice sentiment, execution might be a bit problematic. That’s a typical useless Utopian philosophy no better than a recipe for barbecued whale (Step 1…Catch a whale).

Just as safe or dangerous as they ever were.

Computing can be so much more practical than it currently is. If we held ourselves to a higher standard– if our society encouraged from its citizens a deeper understanding of and more purposeful activities that apply computation– then we would all be much further ahead than we currently are.

Finding the highest number is still the same algorithm, I mean you can sort a list & pull the last number or whatever, but realistically the bug that the programmer ran across can easily happen these days.

Things haven’t changed as much as you think.

Nobody has to tell first graders how to count, because they learned how to count in kindergarten.

It’s pretty neat how far computers have come, they are capable of doing what was not possible when the article was written and they claimed it would never be possible, and finding the highest number now is very easy what with modern languages and everything.

I look forward to reading an article about 2009 in 2049 and laughing about the state of society, present or past.

Ironically one of the frequent criticisms of them is how they keep the workings of their systems very secret – and so humans don’t have the information to spot if the computers have done something wrong.