The third age of computing - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 319

Today's global Internet emerged, along with the increasing availability of wire-
less networks, from early experiments with the ARPANET, a computer network
created by the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1960s and the 1970s as a
means of communication between research laboratories and universities. And
by the 1990s, the World Wide Web had arrived to transform our online lives.
The web made it possible for people with little computer proficiency to surf the
Internet. It also enabled electronic commerce sites such as Amazon to emerge as
serious competitors to bricks-and-mortar businesses. The increasing connectivity
of our computing and communication devices has also led to the rise of social
networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and the emergence of crowdsourcing ,
the practice of gathering services, ideas, information, or money by soliciting con-
tributions from a large group of people online. Crowdsourcing websites include
Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a service that uses humans to perform tasks that
people do better than computers, such as comparing colors or translating for-
eign languages. Another is Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia that permits anyone
to write and edit almost all its articles. Still another is Galaxy Zoo, an astronomy
project that invites people to help classify large numbers of galaxies.
Butler Lampson's third age of computing is about using computers for
embodiment - that is, using computers to interact with people in new and
intelligent ways:
The most exciting applications of computing in the next 30 years will engage
with the physical world in a non-trivial way. Put another way, computers will
become embodied. 2
He asserts that the present state of computer applications, such as robotic sur-
gery, remote-controlled drones, robotic vacuum cleaners, and cruise controls
for cars, are still in their infancy. In the next few decades, Lampson predicts,
medical science will develop prosthetic eyes and ears that will enable people to
really see and hear; cars will drive themselves; sensors in our homes and bodies
will continuously monitor our health and well-being; and we will have intelli-
gent, robot personal assistants to help us both at work and at home.
For computer systems to achieve such engagement, Lampson believes,
they will have to handle uncertainty and probability as well as they now han-
dle facts:
Probability is also essential, since the machine's model of the physical world
is necessarily uncertain. We are just beginning to learn how to write programs
that can handle uncertainty. They use the techniques of statistics, Bayesian
inference and machine learning to combine models of the connections among
random variables, both observable and hidden, with observed data to learn
parameters of the models and then to infer hidden variables such as the
location of vehicles on a road from observations such as the image data from
a camera. 3
In addition to managing uncertainty, many of the applications of embodi-
ment will need to be much more dependable than today's computer systems.
Computers driving cars or performing surgical procedures are obvious exam-
ples of applications in which reliability is critical for safety. We need methods