A great article on Thinking Machines August 13, 2007
Posted by Geordie in World Domination.trackback
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Lots of great stuff in this one. Reflections on a deep truth:
[Founder Danny] Hillis later complained about the injustice of a world where “the real money is in handling Wal-Mart’s inventory rather than searching for the origins of the universe.”
The main take-away point from that article seems to be that you shouldn’t put someone with no business experience, and merely an educational background in interior design, in charge of a technology company. If that person happens to also be paranoid, arrogant and narcissicistic, then you really have a recipe for disaster.
Brings to mind that breathy 1983 classic by Feigenbaum, The Fifth Generation, wherein AI and Prolog / Lisp processors would soon alter the very fabric of our society! Darn. Naturally, parallels could be drawn to some of the hype surrounding the development of quantum processors, but we won’t go there today. I look forward to a meaty, quantitative review of that next bit of hardware from D-Wave; even if the results are negative for the reasons many suspect, the data itself should make for a decent read–and who knows, it might even reveal something unexpected. That’s the cool part about science…
-Mike