Getting computers to understand

Embodiment 2010 vision, speech, robots, smart dust I think of storage as communication with the past, and by “embodiment ” I mean somewhat unconstrained interactions with the physical world. The dates are when the wave began to be important; it’s interesting that they are about 25 years apart. Currently, the communication wave is in full flood, and the first signs of embodiment are starting to appear. Of course, old waves don’t recede: simulation continues to be an important class of applications. New applications are enabled to some extent by new knowledge, but mainly by Moore’s law, that is, by improvement in the cost/performance of computing hard-ware: processing, RAM, disk, and communications. This has been running at about a factor of 100 per decade. Sometimes, as with speech recognition or web search engines, the cheaper cycles or bytes are applied directly. Often, however, spending more hardware resources makes it possible to spend much less programming effort, as with applications that use web browsers or database systems as components. I find it much harder to predict what will happen in computing during the nex