Oliver_Henniges - 2:40 pm on Sep 19, 2008 (gmt 0)

The basic ideas of that intelligent cloud had already been sketched by Marvin Minsky in the early sixties, if I remember correctly. He was very successful raising funds and research budgets with his promises of what Artificial Intelligence might manage to do within only a few decades.

Now, fifty years later, I still have to drive my car myself, which I hate.

No. "Understanding the world" is a permanent challenge at best, a "regulative ideal of reason" as Kant would say. A robot to understand the plot of a story? On the niveau of most Hollywood-bull#*$! maybe, but we developed a different class over here. The google machines killing their programmers after understanding Oedipus, hehe.

A funny side-note of recent past: We had an order from Great-Britain a couple of weeks ago. The customer obviously had used googles translation tool, which had translated our company-name with the correct english noun. But it is a company name, not as large as the one distributing the Kleinweich-operating-system, but a company name. And this company name follows the standard of being one of the first prominent words in the upper left corner of every page on our website. If google really targets to understand "the world", it should probably begin with this very core of it's business: Understanding websites. All else will follow.

[edited by: Oliver_Henniges at 3:28 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2008]