Word: silicon
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...that hardly stopped the city of Los Angeles from showering $85 million in tax credits and other incentives on DreamWorks SKG, the new Hollywood studio formed by moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. Also in on the deal were four high-tech companies, including IBM and Silicon Graphics, that are teaming up with DreamWorks to build an entertainment factory on 260 acres of wetlands where Howard Hughes once assembled his lumbering wooden "Spruce Goose" plane. DreamWorks wasn't leaving the area--it needs the specialized talent that lives there--yet Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan didn't want...
...California can't arbitrarily lower its cost of labor or real estate. Intel, the world's largest maker of microchips, chose Albuquerque, New Mexico, as the site for a new $1.3 billion semiconductor plant, stiffing its own headquarters location in pricey Silicon Valley. New Mexico sweetened the deal further by giving Intel a 30-year exemption from property taxes for the plant, which Intel says will create 3,000 jobs. The exemption formed the bulk of a 30-year, $566 million incentive package from New Mexico that works out to nearly $190,000 per job. (New Mexico's unemployment rate...
DIED. DAVID PACKARD, 83, electronics and computer pioneer; in Stanford, California. The "Birthplace of Silicon Valley," an official California State landmark, is the garage where Packard and his Stanford University classmate William Hewlett opened a workshop in 1939. Today Hewlett-Packard is the nation's second largest computer maker (behind IBM). Packard eschewed corporate pomposity, preferring "management by walking around" to keep employee morale high and focus on achieving objectives. In the '60s, he met with Stanford students protesting his company's defense contracts, and later mediated talks between them and their school. His personable style and civic activism inspired...
...baby can do. "It sits there waving its arm around, watching its arm, reaching for things," he says. These are pretty standard tricks for newborn humans, of course, but then Brooks' "baby" (nicknamed Cog) isn't exactly human. It's a vaguely person-shaped concoction of metal, plastic and silicon, with cameras where its eyes should be and eight 32-bit microprocessors for a brain. Cog is an artificially intelligent computer that is trying to learn about the world the way babies do, programming and reprogramming itself through interactions with the people and objects around it. And Brooks, a professor...
...pond scum. Or perhaps Ray's digital beings will set off down the same sort of evolutionary path our species has traveled, only at electron speed. And if that happens, what then? We may find ourselves face to face with an artificial intelligence so thoroughly immersed in the silicon realm, so distant from our curious, carbon-based concerns, that we cannot even hope to converse with...