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There are AIs aplenty roaming the world at this time, but virtually all of them fall far short of generally applicable human level sentience. There's many 'idiot savants' and 'expert systems' available, superb in certain niche areas and inadequate in most all others, but there's only a tiny number of approximately human level or better general computer-based intelligences in the world now, and most of those are unrecognized and under-utilized by their human users, operating via distributed processing involving many separate, standalone resources, to exist-- such as the financial intelligences evolving in the nets connecting central banks and other financial institutions.
Keep in mind the heavy restrictions on the original statement here-- at this time there has simply been another piece of the ultimate human-peer AI puzzle fall into place. Others are still required to achieve the sort of AI milestones upon which movie blockbusters are based.
-- "Scientists Demo a Quantum Computer"
By CHARLES ARTHUR, the Independent, London, and New York Times Syndicate, on or about 4-18-98, and others
Evolving artificial organisms on a chip Adrian Thompson's FPGAs act eerily like living organisms-- that is, change the environment in which they developed, and their performance can suffer greatly. Somehow Thompson's FPGAs utilize sometimes undetectable quirks about adjoining circuitry or other elements in the immediate vicinity to perform their feats. Change those elements and performance suffers (sometimes catastrophically). This of course makes FPGA solutions like Thompson's unsuitable for the type of general applications chips are used for today in industry, despite their seeming advantages in other areas. -- "Evolving a Conscious Machine" by Gary Taubes, DISCOVER Vol. 19 No. 6 (June 1998) Single molecule-sized logic gates were created in 1999. New techniques to pack 400 times more circuitry onto a single chip have also been discovered. The 400x tech will reportedly not be patented either, thereby possibly speeding up its adoption by industry. -- Breakthroughs all around by PAUL GILSTER, December 6, 1999, http://www.nandotimes.com |