20 years to they day, we remember a seminal day in the history of computer science as Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology took a quantum leap forward. On January 12th, 1992, the Heuristically programmed algorithmic computer, or HAL for short, was brought on line in Urbana, Illinois. HAL, to put it mildly, was a revelation in how we thought about the potential power of computers and our ability to program into them independent thought, reason, adaptation, and improvisation. In fact, the HAL computer system was so far ahead of its time that even the subsequent generations of supercomputers, such as Deep Blue, Deep Thought, and the Ken Jennings-spanking Watson, have been incapable of approaching let alone replicating HAL's near human ability to process problems and respond to them of their own accord. Of course, this failure to produce an equivalent technology in the intervening years has less to do with an inability to recapture silicon lightning in a bottle than an willingness to replicate the tragedies of the past. For, as most people know, the HAL 9000 computer was deactivated in 2001 after it intentionally caused the deaths of 4 astronauts on the Discovery One mission to Jupiter. As important as the discovery of humans' ability to create a new digital intelligence was, the lesson of what would happen when we released that intelligence into our world was equally as important. Can you imagine what would have happened if HAL 9000 had been wired into our national defense grid? He would have had the power to not just eliminate a few extraterrestrial explorers but to make humans subservient to a new race of robot overlords (Terminators if you will). Thank goodness that is a reality we have been able to avoid.
This blog post is sponsored by Protovision Games.
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