Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 59.
Ray Kurzweil receiving the National Medal of Technology, the U.S.A.'s high-
est honour in technology, presented by President Clinton at a White House Ceremony
on 14 March 2000 (Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil and Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.)
real-time speech translation from one human language to another,
intelligent computerized personal assistants that can converse and
rapidly search and understand the world's knowledge bases, and a
profusion of other machines with increasingly broad and flexible
intelligence.
...
Also keep in mind that the progression of computer intelligence
will sneak up on us. As just one example, consider Garry Kas-
parov's confidence in 1990 that a computer would never come close
to defeating him. After all, he had played the best computers, and
their chess-playing ability, compared to his, was pathetic. But com-
puter chess playing made steady progress, gaining forty-five rating
points each year. In 1997, a computer sailed past Kasparov, at least
in chess. There has been a great deal of commentary that other
