"We spent years teaching one research computer how to recognize continuous human speech. We exposed it to thousands of hours of recorded speech, corrected its errors, and patiently improved its performance. Finally, it became quite adept at recognizing speech (I dictated most of my recent book to it). Now if you want your own personal computer to recognize speech, it doesn’t have to go through the same process; you can just download the fully trained patterns in seconds. Ultimately, billions of nonbiological entities can be the master of all human and machine acquired knowledge."
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Unlike many contemporary “neural net” machines, which use mathematically simplified models of human neurons, some contemporary neural nets are already using highly detailed models of human neurons, including detailed nonlinear analog activation functions and other relevant details. Although the ability of today’s computers to extract and learn knowledge from natural language documents is limited, their capabilities in this domain are improving rapidly.
Computers will be able to read on their own, understanding and modeling what they have read, by the second decade of the twenty-first century. We can then have our computers read all of the world’s literature–books, magazines, scientific journals, and other available material. Ultimately, the machines will gather knowledge on their own by venturing out on the web, or even into the physical world, drawing from the full spectrum of media and information services, and sharing knowledge with each other (which machines can do far more easily than their human creators).
Raymond Kurzweil, 2004