2001: a disappointment? talks about

2001: a disappointment? talks about the current status of computer evolution as compared with that demonstrated in Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a good review of the progress of AI, but contains this curious passage:

“This year, we can now say at the safety of its end, did not bring us a Hal, or anything like it. Computers can play a pretty good game of chess, transliterate speech and recognise handwriting and faces. But their intelligence does not touch our own, and the prevailing scientific wisdom seems to be that it never will.”

Never? Never is a very long time. I’m betting that the mechanics of evolution will eventually win out over “prevailing scientific wisdom”.