| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : FEBRUARY 15, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Brainy Gizmos WHEN THINGS START TO THINK By Neil Gershenfeld Holt 225pp $25 What does it mean for a thing to think? In the 1930s, at the dawn of the computer age, British mathematician Alan Turing put it in a nutshell: A computer will have achieved intelligence when a person chatting over a teletype is unable to tell whether a human being or a machine is at the other end of the conversation. After half a century, the prospect of passing the Turing test remains so remote that many computer scientists have abandoned it as a practical goal. But don't tell that to the optimists at the Things That Think (TTT) consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. The lab hasn't come close to producing a thing that thinks, but its projects offer a special mix of cool and commercial potential. In When Things Start to Think, TTT's co-director, physicist Neil Gershenfeld, has written an enjoyable if rather disjointed account of its work. Some of the consortium's efforts, such as a computer powered by the flexing of a shoe sole, seem a bit far-fetched. Others, like the work with Yo-Yo Ma to develop an electronic cello with the musical characteristics of a Stradivarius, sound like great fun but are of limited practicality. Others, however, could be of real importance. For example, a project to make a computer display out of a flexible sheet of paper-like plastic is now being turned into a commercial product by Cambridge (Mass.) spin-off E Ink Corp., with dynamic billboards likely to be the first application. A strange collaboration involving the Media Lab, composer Tod Machover, and entertainers Penn & Teller ended up producing a sensor that made car airbags safer for children. And the discussion of quantum computing, while it's heavy going at times, describes a breakthrough that could produce machines faster by orders of magnitude than anything around today. Gershenfeld tends to be relentlessly upbeat. While it's hard to fault him for his optimism, which seems to come with the territory at the Media Lab, one wishes he were more skeptical about the impact of technology on society. In general, he seems to believe that whatever problems technology has caused, the cure lies in more technology. In some cases, this faith may be well-grounded. For example, the difficulty that many people have using present-day computers may well be cured by power and more built-in intelligence that will allow engineers to make the machines' inherent complexity invisible to users. This has happened with automobiles, so why not with computers? Gershenfeld is far too sanguine, however, when he dismisses concerns about privacy in the Information Age as ''a complex and personal trade-off'' between convenience and security. All too often, consumers have no idea how much personal information they are disclosing, or to whom, when they visit a Web site or use a credit card, whether online or not. Unless consumers somehow gain the ability to navigate these trade-offs on the basis of informed consent, there's likely to be a nasty backlash somewhere down the pike--regardless of what thinking things may think. BY STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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