Word: processing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This modest explanation hardly does justice to a cerebral process that has resulted in the world's first successful man-powered and solar-powered aircraft, earned its owner the title of Engineer of the Century from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and won him worldwide acclaim. Now at 75 he is still spewing out offbeat and innovative ideas faster than his creative team at AeroVironment can act on them. Currently in the works are projects ranging from a solar-powered, unmanned plane with a wingspan nearly as large as a football field to a pocket-size device that substitutes...
...this good news? Or is this a threat to humanity's perch of evolutionary superiority? Alarm at the specter of ceding control over the creative process to machines has catapulted the debate beyond the scientific community and into the public forum. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has written about a wide range of dangers that could arise when we no longer have our metaphorical hands "on the plug...
Before we indulge these philosophical concerns, it's worth exploring just how intelligent and inventive machines are evolving. A powerful paradigm for emulating the creative process in a computer is to copy the ways of nature. One particularly compelling "biologically inspired" approach is actually to simulate the process of evolution inside the computer...
...music and poetry. The results of emulating nature in this way can be surprisingly effective, often solving difficult engineering and other design problems. However, as a human inventor who routinely uses these techniques, I can report that I continue to feel that I am still in charge of the process; they feel like just another set of yet more powerful tools...
...Since the Industrial Revolution was born two centuries ago with automated textile machines for the English clothing industry, we have been eliminating jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder while creating new (and, incidentally, more interesting and better paying) jobs at the top of the skill ladder. This process has progressed to the point where we are harnessing machines to assist with the creative process of creating yet better machines...