If you get a chance, watch Jeopardy tonight, at 7:30 PM EST, on Channel 7. It is a recast of IBM's Son of Deep Blue (Deep Blue beat the world chess champion handily) playing against former Jeopardy champions. There is already an urban legend growing, apparently the computer dominates.

Keep in mind, this computer has no connection to the world outside its' box other than its stereo-vision camera and its stereo-hearing microphones. It does all its own speech recognition, all its own video pattern-recognition, and can access a DB2 database so fast as to think faster than almost any human alive.

With a little more processing power, it will be able to handle walking and balance.

Not much of a leap from there to a 210 mph roadrace bike that can calculate its route around the race track 1,000 times faster and more precisely than any human. With radar and ultrasound, it will be able to pass and avoid getting bumped with ease.

And the cool thing is, they will have to attach a skeletal robot to the bike and make it shift its weight just like a real racer, because physics is physics and you must pay its price.

Raymond Kurzweil got it right, within 15 years the computers will be better at roadracing than any human, and by 2045, they will reach such a high degree of artificial intelligence and learning ability as to reach the point if you talk to two "people" you cannot see, and one of them is a computer, you won't be able to tell which one it is.

Based on where the technology is going in a mere 20 years from now, much less 2045, the premise of Terminator is far less fantastic and sci fi than it was 20 years ago.

Now if I can just make it past 2012 I might get to see some of it come to be. It will be marvelous.

Wisdom and educated guesstimation will eventually prevail.....with todays testing of "nano-circuitry" and micro robotics we are not far from a new space age

The computers we will have in 10 years will be many magnitudes of 10 faster than the connection between the eye and the part of the brain that makes decisions.

There are already many operations the computer can do far better than humans.

One notable is robotic welders. Also robotic painters. They carry out the correct operations, and respond to variations, far faster and more reliably than humans. They also never suffer from a brain fart.

You will never see a computerized race bike high side itself. Considering it will sample and evaluate a hundred inputs faster than the best human rider, it will be as dominating as Watson is in Jeopardy.

Will some human drift over and run it off the track? No doubt. To err is human.

John Henry

Yep, and today track and roadway both are laid down by computerized machines. The most humans do is feed raw materials to it.