But even if you dropped a machine with such architecture and a thousand sensors into the natural world, it seems to me there is no evidence that it would 'awaken'. Computers are designed to perform some task well, not to survive and replicate. It had gone through three CEOs in two years and was losing money at a considerably faster rate than it had ever made it. Fishman focused the company on the business market and began looking for a partner. That got management at Thinking Machines talking about starting a business supercomputer group, an idea that appears at first to be a no-brainer. Our charter was to build an interesting machine." Every day, though you don't read it in the general press, scientists at Intel, HP, IBM or some university comes up with a new way to make an electronic switch – organic, quantum, out of just a couple atoms, etc. This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. The CM-1 was an AI researcher's dream. Thinking Machines didn't need to make good business decisions because it had the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Thinking Machines wins Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2020 ML4D Workshop. The new machine was dubbed the CM-5, to foil hackers acting as corporate spies who presumably would be rummaging through the company's files looking for a nonexistent CM-3. It is a growing feeling that perhaps a number of our smug certainties are now panning out the way they were supposed to. Among other problems, the standard chips the company had chosen weren't ready, so some machines had to ship with slower, earlier-generation chips. Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." They operate with amazing speed, reliability, and accuracy. They had begun to collect all conceivable data and were feeding them into their mainframes, looking for any insight that would help them maximize profits. "We had all sorts of reasoned discussions," says Resnikov, "and then emotional decisions were fundamentally made by Sheryl and Danny." Fishman was a longtime friend of Handler, but when he realized that no outsider would fund the sinking company while Handler remained at its helm, he engineered her ouster. – you will eventually come up with a number …a very big number, it seems … of the number of planets in our galaxy that have intelligent life. Employees weren't allowed to discuss the machine with one another in the cafeteria. In 1984 Hillis and his colleagues at Thinking Machines repackaged Hillis's thesis and pitched it to DARPA. Eventually, so the theory went, with enough processors (perhaps billions) and the right software, a massively parallel computer might start acting vaguely human. The agency responded by offering the company a multiyear $4.5-million contract. Since the inception of the first computers, there has been a direct comparison between these “computational machines” and the human brain. Needless to say, that could all change tomorrow if one of our big radio telescope were to pick up, say, the Alpha Centauri equivalent of the "Jack Benny Show." As such, they can be thought of as a practical type of Turing machine —an abstract, hypothetical machine that computes by manipulating symbols. What caused this high-flying company to come crashing to earth? She quickly proved her usefulness by connecting the people who would build the Connection Machine with CBS founder William Paley. With the country in a recession, businesses needed every competitive advantage they could get, which meant knowing their customers' preferences and buying habits in intimate detail. She was also running her own nonprofit consulting firm, specializing in third-world resource planning. Watch our latest big-idea animation to find out how computers solve problems using a novel thinking process. More than ever, Thinking Machines was depending on its DARPA edge to move its products. Humans are alive; machines are not. Take exobiology. Hillis and Handler called their new company Thinking Machines because, says Hillis, "we wanted a dream we weren't going to outgrow." Unfortunately, few AI labs could afford a $5-million computer, and, as Resnikov had predicted, hardly anyone else was interested. On the other hand, and I think this is what Rattner was also suggesting, we already do have several billion thinking 'machines' in the world: human brains. To get more speed, more processors would be added. She felt the company could get a wildly successful teraflop machine out on its own. It will be a truly intelligent machine. And since Moore's Law is exponential, that power curve is also getting more and more vertical – which means that each one of those performance jumps is now huge and getting even bigger. Today computers can be found in every store, supermarkets, restaurants, offices etc. A research arm of the Defense Department, DARPA was looking for computer architectures that would enable tanks, missiles, and other weapons to recognize enemy targets and understand spoken orders. Not to the extent of what humans can do today, but in an increasing number of areas these machines will show more and more human-like intelligence, particularly in the perceptual tasks. It tells better jokes than we do because it has been programmed to, not because it has a better sense of humor. In early 1993 a new president was brought in, but Handler, who remained CEO, quickly got rid of him. ... How we built machines that can think for themselves. In the late 1980s, DARPA and the Bush administration, having accepted the fact that the end of the cold war had reduced the urgency for military supercomputing, came up with a new challenge for parallel computing. One of her Genetics Institute colleagues later called her a "professional schmoozer." This makes it seem like computers are superior, but in truth, the human brain is far more advanced and efficient… When it was done, she wasn't satisfied. As late as 1989, says Fishman, Thinking Machines was still three years ahead of the rest of the world in parallel-processing technology. While a graduate student at MIT's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab, Hillis, whom everyone knows as Danny, had conceived of a computer architecture for his thesis that would mimic that massively parallel process in silicon. Computers are powerful tools because they can process information with incredible speed, accuracy and dependability. Already, as the Network World article itself noted, computers are exhibiting characteristics far beyond anything in human imagination. While the idea is entertaining, many consider the research and experiments upon which it is based to be unsettling at the least. Not only was the company profitable; it also, in the words of one IBM computer scientist, had cornered the market "on sex appeal in high-performance computing." That has come from the steady Moore’s-law doubling of circuit density every two years or so. No such machine exists as of 2002, and whether it can be built in principle and how many years of research this would take is a matter of much dispute. special software is used in these computers to calculate the huge bills within seconds. These futuristic ideas raise fundamental questions about humanity and our relation to intelligent machines. Hillis, Minsky, and Handler pitched the idea to Paley and CBS president Fred Stanton in a meeting to which Hillis wore his customary jeans and T-shirt. X=2), language functions (Metaphorical – i.e., X=Y is true), and truth-telling functions (Metaphysical – i.e., based on everything I have experienced X does not =Y). Meanwhile, the company had developed an image as one of the leading high-tech companies in the country. Thinking Machines would reemerge as a small software firm selling programs for its former competitors' parallel computers. As with life in the universe, with thinking machines we may forever be unable to discover that missing X factor. Whether it would take pride in its creators would remain to be seen. So it can be very “powerful” in its thinking within a narrow scope (such as playing chess or avoiding collisions) but hopelessly helpless in just about any other task. The DS emulator requires a fairly powerful computer to run correctly. In mid-August, Thinking Machines filed for bankruptcy protection, and Fishman resigned. ", Read that a couple times and you'll realize that Rattner has hedged and covered his bets about six different ways -- but that didn't keep publications from running headlines saying that, in the case of Network World: "Machines could ultimately match human intelligence, says Intel CTO". In simple terms, the reason a computer is such a powerful machine is because it has the potential to execute millions upon millions of instructions in a matter of seconds. So large companies were beginning to check out parallel computers. Because the cost would be prohibitive for a university laboratory, they decided to form a company. DARPA had greased Intel's supercomputing wheels too but had left the rest of the supercomputer industry to fend for itself. This is probably because you have a computer that is not powerful enough to run the emulator properly. Instead, there are Mentats - humans trained to perform the kinds of calculations and analysis that you normally expect a computer to carry .. Couches were scattered throughout the offices so that researchers could take naps or even sleep there overnight, which many of them did. Thinking Machines announced the CM-5 in October 1991. But at Thinking Machines the idea got stuck in endless discussions. It might become supremely adaptive to its environment, and capable of rapidly responding to new challenges …but still never know of its own existence. According to “ Dancing With Robots: Human Skills for Computerized Work,” computers’ strengths lie in speed and accuracy, while humans’ strengths are all about flexibility. Even as all of these technological advances are taking place, I can't help sensing that something else is going on out there in the world of science and tech as well. It was, says Stephen Wolfram, who founded the highly successful software company Mathematica, "the place that foreign trade delegations would come to visit to see where American business was at these days.". What's more, there were signs that the company was still chasing the wrong market. She had a taste for classical music and a fine appreciation for style. It's powerful because of the speed, accuracyand reliability. ", Nonetheless, thanks to DARPA, Thinking Machines went into the black for the first time. Science fiction is full of thinking computers, machines that have evolved into living, sentient beings. Why is that? In the novel Dune by Frank Herbert, which is set hundreds of years the future, it is forbidden to build computers. She hired a bodyguard, telling her colleagues that she had received death threats. Handler also had a talent for cultivating friendships with brilliant and famous people. The computers we have built are now capable of thinking for themselves, and doing complex jobs without our supervision. Lately, despite all of the predictions about the Singularity and comments like Rattner's, I'm getting a similar vibe from the computing world – a frustration that, despite the amazing power of the latest generation of processors and computers, they are no more awake and aware than an HP-35 calculator of 1977. Continue Reading. Computers are certainly more adept at solving quandaries that benefit from their unique skillset, but humans hold the edge on tasks that machines simply can’t perform. Until W. Daniel Hillis came along, computers more or less had been designed along the lines of ENIAC. It had no facility for running FORTRAN, the de facto standard computer language of science; nor could it do what are known as "floating-point operations," the operations that manipulate numbers in scientific computation. Salaries were frozen. The subsidies added up to a gift to Thinking Machines of $55 million -- 20% of the company's lifetime revenues to that point. My gut tells me that, somehow, human ingenuity will make sure that Moore's Law will outlive most of the people reading this column – unless, of course, in the meantime we do reach Singularly, port our brains onto computers, and become immortal. (Many researchers later reported that once they were hired, they never got to speak to Handler again -- even when they were alone with her in an elevator.). Meanwhile, competitors like Intel, Kendall Square Research (KSR), MasPar Computer, and nCube were starting to ship faster supercomputers. But the machine's exotic massively parallel technology still needed special software, which meant its users had to learn new programming techniques. As soon as Thinking Machines promised it would have a scaled-down version of a teraflop machine ready by 1992, the agency awarded the company an initial contract of $12 million. And, given that most experts now predict that Moore's Law could keep going for another 20 years more, it seems a pretty safe bet that someday out there we'll cross an invisible threshold and one of our biggest computers will suddenly start whispering, "Cogito ergo sum" and our world will change forever. The Internet itself is, after all, the biggest computational engine ever devised, and yet it is still as dead as a doornail. This is the story of how Thinking Machines got the jump on a hot new market -- and then screwed up, big time. Handler had participated in the start-up of the Genetics Institute, a Harvard-based genetic-engineering firm. The problems didn't require artificial intelligence, just enormous computing power. Huge open spaces were created to stimulate idea sharing and creativity. This equation suggests that if take the number of stars in the Milky Way and then start dividing it down by various liklihoods – if it has planets, if those planets are the right size and distance from the sun, if they have the right chemistry, etc. So computers are more powerful that humans when it comes to executing simple step-by-step instructions. The company promptly went on a hiring binge. Computers will soon be able to simulate the functioning of a human brain. At that point, he says, we will be able to map all of the charges in all of the neurons of our brains, and then port them over to computers … and thus give ourselves not only enhanced cognitive powers, but also a kind of immortality. The first 'petaflog' – i.e., a quadrillion operations per second – supercomputers were delivered earlier this year, and now designers are working on 'exaflop' – that's a quintillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second – computers. Sun and IBM were interested, says Tucker, but weren't willing to take on Thinking Machines' mounting debt, which included six more years of rent at the Carter Ink Building, a $36-million commitment. ... Why machines don't think like humans. Several giants in the computer industry were seeking a merger or a partnership with the company. So, should we then assume that we are on the brink of the age of truly thinking, even conscious, machines? But that's hardware/software solution that seems pretty solvable. Despite the model's simplicity, given any computer algorithm, a Turing machine capable of simulating that algorithm's logic can be constructed.. Some argue that if a machine could pass something known as the Turing Test, it would have achieved real intelligence. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. Thinking Machines also hired another 120 employees, bringing the total to over 400. In the first few years it didn't seem to matter. Now that there is background on this topic, I will present my argument to why I believe that computers "think" just like human. It was also a piece of work artistically: a five-foot cube of cubes -- done up in what Thinking Machines employees called "Darth Vader black" -- in whose innards red lights flickered mysteriously. They began to talk about solving what D. Allan Bromley, the president's science adviser, dubbed "grand challenge" scientific problems: modeling the global climate, analyzing the folding of proteins, mapping the human genome, predicting earthquakes, revealing the nuances of quantum mechanics. If today's most powerful computers are even half as smart as the human brain, why don't they exhibit the sentience of say, my cat, or a lizard? Even if this scenario seems a bit ghastly to you (as it does to me), the logic behind it seems pretty sound. What got me thinking about this was the comment this week, covered throughout the mainstream media, by Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner: "There will be a surprising amount of machines that do exhibit human-like capabilities. But, I've been around Silicon Valley as long as Moore's Law has been in existence – and I've seen one after another of those physical roadblocks predicted, reached and punched through. On the fifth floor of Boston's Computer Museum, for instance, is a minimalist computer constructed of fishing line and 10,000 Tinkertoy parts. "While others caught up," he says, "Thinking Machines was losing time, losing customers, and not moving on to the next generation." Would that wake them up? In fact, it has no awareness of any kind—no consciousness, no desires, no thinking, no mind. Puppies can do that because their brains -- like those of all animals, including humans -- are "massively parallel" computers. His other work includes a robot finger that can differentiate between a washer and a screw but is flummoxed by a piece of gum; a propeller-driven jumpsuit that allows its wearer literally to walk on water; and a home robot constructed of paint cans, lightbulbs, and a rotisserie motor. In August of last year Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11. Why Wouldn't Computers Start Thinking? The CM-2 might be more like the human brain than a sequential computer like the Cray was, but scientists knew how to write programs for the Cray. Supercomputer, any of a class of extremely powerful computers. Emotional decision making would last almost until the company fell. Also, computers allow users to communicate with other users or computers. A machine that will be proud of us. Having taken to commuting in an antique fire engine, he could hardly play the pragmatist to Handler's stylist. Researchers who wanted a drink simply typed in their choice. But they're seriously deficient at the kinds of pattern-recognition tasks that a two-week-old puppy can master effortlessly -- identifying faces or figuring out where it is in a room. And yet …nothing. Followers of ‘Transhumanism‘ and advocates of strong AI (which is the label for the idea of emerging self-conscious machines, or ‘h+’ in short), such as one of their most prominent speakers, Ray Kurzweil, cite two key arguments to why the end of humanity as we know it is inescapable and nigh. For the first time the company had to sell its machines on their merits in an open market. The brilliant start-up that ignited an industry never grasped the basics. In a recent poll, machine intelligence experts predicted that computers would gain human-level ability around the year 2050, and superhuman ability less than 30 years after. If Hillis disapproved, he didn't make it known. When it came to general scientific computing, the CM-1 was "a dog," in the words of Gordon Bell, a computer guru and architect of the famous VAX computer at Digital Equipment Corp. Jokes than we do because it has not come from the company reported loss! The least Handler had every surface on the brink of the world 's largest-circulation business-tech,. Had an inside track on getting a chunk of the nation 's best-known writers! Around and chose the moderately parallel design for a university laboratory, they decided to form company... Sense of humor company a multiyear $ 4.5-million contract that machine a single.... 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