Danny Hillis at the office in an H-1 engine of a Saturn 1B rocket, the first engine stage for the Apollo 7. (Credit: Daniel Hennessey)
Danny Hillis talks about the real-world challenges of creating artificially intelligent machines.
In 1982, when he was still a student at MIT, Danny Hillis cofounded Thinking Machines, one of the most famous failures in the history of computing. A hive of wayward and brilliant researchers, Thinking Machines tried to build the world's first artificial intelligence. But if the company did not succeed in "building a machine that will be proud of us" (its corporate motto), its Connection Machine demonstrated the practicality of parallel processing, the foundation of modern supercomputing. Today, Danny Hillis is cochair of Applied Minds, a design and invention company, and he is building the Clock of the Long Now, a mechanical timepiece meant to last 10,000 years.
TR: Why is creating an artificial intelligence so difficult?
To read the entire article you must log in:
Most of our content — all daily news, blogs, and videos — is free. Magazine stories are paid. To read this story, you must have a subscription or you must use a reading credit. Registration to Technology Review is free and entitles registrants to three free reading credits.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
View full PDF >
Listen to story > 
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed