Publisher's Synopsis
Inspired by HAL's self-proclaimed birth date, "HAL's Legacy" reflects upon science fiction's most famous computer and explores the relationship between science fantasy and technological fact. The non-technical 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 look at the technologies that would be critical if we were, as Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick imagined 30 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 interactions. 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.
