HAL's Legacy : 2001's Computer As Dream and Reality

by David G. Stork (Ed.)

• ISBN13: 9780262692113
• ISBN10: 0262692112
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-02-06
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

"I became operational . . . in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997." Inspired by HAL's self-proclaimed birth date, HAL's Legacyreflects upon science fiction's most famous computer and explores the relationship between science fantasy and technological fact. The informative, nontechnical chapters written especially for this book describe many of the areas of computer science critical to the design of intelligent machines, discuss whether scientists in the 1960s were accurate about the prospects for advancement in their fields, and look at how HAL has influenced scientific research. Contributions by leading scientists look at the technologies that would be critical if we were, as Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick imagined thirty years ago, to try and build HAL in 1997: supercomputers, fault-tolerance and reliability, planning, artificial intelligence, lipreading, speech recognition and synthesis, commonsense reasoning, the ability to recognize and display emotion, and human-machine interaction. Not only would these technologies be critical in building HAL, but all are being explored for the design of today's intelligent machines. A separate chapter by philosopher Daniel Dennett considers the ethical implications of intelligent machines. Profusely illustrated with color images from the film and from current research, HAL's Legacyprovides surprising new perspectives on key moments in the film - you will never view 2001 the same way again.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

The Best-Informed Dream: HAL and the Vision of 2001

Scientist on the Set: An Interview with Marvin Minsky

Could We Build HAL? Supercomputer Design

"Foolproof and Incapable of Error?" Reliable Computing and Fault Tolerance

"An Enjoyable Game": How HAL Plays Chess

"The Talking Computer": Text to Speech Synthesis

When Will HAL Understand What We Are Saying? Computer Speech Recognition and Understanding

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that": How Could HAL Use Language?

From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL

Eyes for Computers: How HAL Could "see"

"I could see your lips move": HAL and Speechreading

Living in Space: Working with the Machines of the Future

Does HAL Cry Digital Tears? Emotions and Computers

"That's something I could not allow to happen": HAL and Planning

Computers, Science, and Extraterrestrials: An Interview with Stephen Wolfram

When HAL Kills, Who's to Blame? Computer Ethics

Contributors

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.