It was funny to found Skynet & John Connor references in the readers comments.
It's also pretty funny that if someone makes/invents a system with Skynet capabilities, there is a posibility that they will name it Skynet. Thus making the terminator series a self fulfilling prophecy!!!!
I love the examples:<p>What was the last major catastrophe? Oh, yeah, we could monitor for tsunamis.<p>What's a common problem people have? Oh, yeah, we could flag bad produce at the store (not even sure what that means...).<p>What do people expect? Oh, yeah, we can make them smaller and faster.<p>The real value sees to be decision-making. Rather than yes/no, which Von Neumann machines do well, these answer "I think so"/"I don't think so". Should be fun to watch, and I hope I get to try coding against one some day. I'm sure that will be a far more mind-altering experience than learning ruby. :)
This could be a breakthrough technology for robotics and AI. For years it has looked liked a new computer architecture would be required to let robots make all of the complex decisions in real-time that humans take for granted, especially in the realm of perception.<p>If these chips can do what they say they can (well), I can't wait to see how they change robotics!
Duplicate of this story from today:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898229" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898229</a>
it starts with the words- " new generation of chip", "supercomputing", " significant step" and ends with "grocer's glove".In any case, these IBM Research guys didn't say a word about robots, space ships, etc. I think it's just noise. But they know how to raise money $21m it's not a joke.
After I read this article I started thinking about Kurzweil's documentary, Singularity. How much longer before we can all become immortal Cyborgs? Is singularity as near as he predicts? (notice the capital C in Cyborg. PWND.)