Maybe closer than we think.
Maybe already here:
What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in a box," said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.
"His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!"
As I'm sure many of you would agree, that's pretty cool.
Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.
But look how quickly the luddite/buzzkill view is to surface:
Others say it is something far more sinister - the beginning of "Terminator" technology, in which self-aware machines could take over the world.
I don't get the impression that anything Thayer is doing is quite ready to take over the world just yet. At leat not the world world. But the popular music world had better look out.
In one weekend, a Creativity Machine learned a sampling of some of Thaler's favorite Top 10 hits from the past three decades and then wrote 11,000 new songs. Some are good, Thaler said. Miller confesses to being haunted by one of the melodies in a minor key. Other offerings are the musical equivalent of a painting of dogs playing poker, Thaler said.
That sounds like a description of 90% of what's on the radio now. On the more serious side, the Creativity Machine has designed toothbrushes, robots, and processes for synthesizing diamonds. It still sounds like it's a long way from world domination. But, who knows, maybe it could be of assistance in addressing some big national challenges.
via Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
Of course, John Koza will say that they've been doing equivalent or better stuff for years with genetic programming. He's always touting "human competitive results" from their machines.
http://www.genetic-programming.com/
Posted by: Bill Tozier at February 2, 2004 10:43 AMMany years ago, I attended a talk by the eminent spectroscopist Tomas Hirschfeld. He said he had solved a certain problem by a new technique: feeding all his data into a minicomputer, which was programmed to search for correlations with a library of spectra. It found a good and surprising one. Hirschfeld said, "It would never have occurred to me to even look for this correlation. I should give the credit where it is due. On the other hand, I am not going down in history as the first man to co-author a paper with an IBM 4341."
So, is Patent One listed as the inventor, or at least co-inventor, on Patent Two?