{"id":888,"date":"2007-09-27T00:04:47","date_gmt":"2007-09-27T06:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=888"},"modified":"2007-09-27T00:04:47","modified_gmt":"2007-09-27T06:04:47","slug":"the_mindreading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=888","title":{"rendered":"The mind-reading computer"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an interview<\/a> with Technology Review, the director of Intel Research, Andrew Chien, looks ahead to what happens when, in the not so distant future, we have “machines with tens or hundreds of [processor] cores perform[ing] trillions of operations every second.” What particularly excites him about what he calls terascale computing is “the ability for devices to understand the world around them and [infer] what their human owners care about.” He foresees pocket-sized “intelligent systems” that, using various sensors and tapping into powerful machine-learning algorithms, will continuously monitor our physical movements, analyze our speech, sense our moods, and anticipate our needs:<\/p>\n

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In order to figure out what you’re doing, the computing system needs to be reading data from sensor feeds, doing analysis, and computing all the time. This takes multiple processors running complex algorithms simultaneously. The machine-learning algorithms being used for inference are based on rich statistical analysis of how different sensor readings are correlated, and they tease out obscure connections. Right now these algorithms work on large systems built for a specific purpose, and it takes a PhD to get these things to work. We are looking forward to having these algorithms be in an API that you can call on, like a platform service which is as reliable to access as a file system. This way, the average programmer without a PhD can make use of these machine-learning algorithms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At some point, one assumes, the programming of the device and the programming of the person would become indistinguishable.<\/p>\n

So how long till this brave new world begins to emerge? Not long at all, says Chien: “Within five years, I think you’re going to see significant advances in performance. You’ll see demonstrations in the research world that are credible. I think the mainstream marketplace could pick up on it three years later, but at that point it’s hard to predict. The precursors for this technology are all there, though, and I see a huge need for it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an interview with Technology Review, the director of Intel Research, Andrew Chien, looks ahead to what happens when, in the not so distant future, we have “machines with tens or hundreds of [processor] cores perform[ing] trillions of operations every second.” What particularly excites him about what he calls terascale computing is “the ability for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}