Word: though
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...little machine in West Lebanon is known as a powder metallurgy press, and to most manufacturers, there ought to be nothing especially new about it. Powder presses have been around for 70 years, stamping out everything from truck-motor parts to medical equipment. Remarkably common though they are, these machines are remarkably crude. Most powder presses are great, loud, chugging things, about the size and shape of a tractor trailer and demanding the ministrations of at least 200 people to keep them running through a workweek. Retooling the presses to switch from making one component to another can take days...
...bought a technology company that made components for motherboards and other PC hardware for the burgeoning computer industry. By the mid-1980s, his company was flourishing, and he had begun making the kind of silicon-driven millions so many other high-tech entrepreneurs were piling up. All the while, though, what really fascinated Beane was reinventing not just products and components but the factory itself--creating a digital manufacturing system for the New Economy. One thing that caught his attention was the problem of the powder press. He wondered if it was possible to update the Industrial Age brute. Before...
Another approach is to create "neural nets"--simulated versions of neurons and their massive interconnections that, while highly simplified, are able to solve real-world design problems and come up with unexpected though still appropriate solutions. These and related methods are also used in computer programs that "automatically" create art, 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...
Within three decades, machines will be as intelligent as humans. By 2030 the available computer hardware will exceed the memory and processing capacity of the human brain by a factor of thousands. Though raw capacity alone does not automatically provide human levels of intelligence, we will have largely completed the reverse engineering of the human brain. Powerful, biologically inspired models based on the various templates of human intelligence will be capable of simulating human thought processes and will ultimately do so at far greater speeds and with far greater overall capacity than unaided human thought...
...Though renowned philosophy professor John R. Searle has called some of Kurzweil's visions "preposterous," several of his predictions about cyberdevelopments of the 1990s--Does a computer beating a world chess champion sound familiar?--have proved dead...