What fired your interest in technology? I was interested in technology, and in being an inventor, from age five. I discovered computers in 1960 at 12 and built some simple ones. I became progressively more fascinated with the ability of computers to create virtual models of realities, including human thinking. I had a mentorship with Marvin Minsky at MIT in 1965 and wrote a program that could emulate musicians by developing a pattern recognition model of melodies. That's when I became interested in pattern recognition - essentially teaching machines to recognise patterns. That is the basis of human intelligence.
Is AI experiencing a renaissance? We're in an era of what I'd call "narrow AI", where systems are performing intelligent functions that used to require human intelligence. Intelligent systems can fly and land airplanes or make financial investment decisions. These were research projects 10 years ago and are now in widespread practical application and have become integrated into our information infrastructure. Every time an application works, it's no longer called AI _ it becomes a separate field. It's speech recognition, character recognition, robotics, machine vision, etc.
How far away is the glitch-free speech recognition software we see in movies? Alan Turing's insight to base the Turing test on human language was correct in that human language encompasses all our intelligence. We won't really achieve human levels of language understanding until we achieve human levels of understanding, which is the holy grail of what's called strong AI". Machines have enough speech recognition over the phone to create personalities that can conduct routine transactions. For example, you can call British Airways and have a conversation, so long as it has to do with making reservations for a BA flight.
The internet? The world wide web is probably the most profound computer-based technology of the past decade. In the 1980s, the Arpanet was small but growing exponentially. There were a few tens of thousands of nodes but it was clear it would be tens of millions by the mid-1990s. Today, it's a pervasive worldwide phenomenon and it ties together everyone and every organisation in the world.
Will viruses become more of a problem? Viruses and other forms of software pathogens are a new form of human-made, self-replicating pathogens. They're getting more sophisticated but our defences are getting equally sophisticated. So far it's remained at a nuisance level. It's a good example of "promise versus peril".
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