History of Emerging Technologies Blog

      In 1950 Alan Turing developed a test for determining if computing machines can be considered intelligent. While this may not fit any person's full definition of intelligence if a computer program can convince a human in a simple conversation even once that they were the same it is no longer a title only living things can be measured by.      Some top minds in the world of science like Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have warned about the threats AI pose to humanity. The extents of human intelligence is already shown as dangerous and disastrous. What is so scary about artificial intelligence is how powerful and fast moving it is. Most computers can respond to a mouse click faster than a human mind can. So when computers can communicate with intelligence in the same way they do with their peripherals it will all happen way faster than humans can respond. In the same way the theory that only when and if time travel becomes possible the past and future will be completely changed

     In class the other day we watched the movie "Start Up Dot Com" set in the early two thousands during the dot com financial bubble. The characters document their experience raising capital for their internet start up GOVworks.com. Khalil and his friend Tom came up with the idea of paying parking tickets online and wanted to publish it to the world, and make millions off of it. Things got more hostile between them and the other investors however when they were trying to find backers and decide how much their idea was worth. I guess everyone was fixated on being a millionaire and that is what most of the movie was about. Their actual product turned out to be messy and filled with bugs in a competitive market and one of their original investors had to be bought out because they did not like him or his lack of contributions. Amid all of this their business is broken in to in what some would call corporate sabotage and to others a distraction. I did not finish the movie in cla

         From the late nineteen nineties to the early two thousandth century the internet went from being very privatized with only a few corporate networks in 1992 like Prodigy, Compuserve, Genie, America On-Line and Delphi to a public information super highway moving faster than any one business could keep up with. Microsoft wanted to expand from just being a software company to having a stake in the internet so in 1992 they teamed up CompuServe to connect users to the internet, this was put in direct competition by Dave Spool's creation of the Mosaic Browser for a graphical internet interface. The now three year old World Wide Web project and two year old HTTP language made the internet more accessible and diverse for all users. The dinosaurs used in your presentation represented the proprietary network businesses too slow to adapt to the changing times, plus they are really fun to play with and research! The company SPRY started only in 1994 to create internet accessible boxes

Erik Hamberg came to class to speak about what living and working in a virtual world means to him. He seems to be a theater geek as well but took that business off the ground by running it online. He is a self published author of many books some that he put out in the same year and a sci fi series that he has just completed. He made this all seem so simple to do until I thought of the prospect of actually writing a book, but both he and you seem to have done it. Some of the local involvement he is a part of really amazed me and how it was so impactful like running the Grand Cinema here for a few years and now the local parks of Tacoma as a commissioner. I visit both of these places regularly and so it amazes me how what he has done in his life has ripples of effect into my own life. The most interesting part of his talk for me was how he now runs a podcast network. He simply reached out to podcasts in the area and set up a network and advertising deals which he says make them much mo