photo credit: LoreleiRanveig

Fancy an extra brain to do some of the thinking for you? Imagine having your very own artificially intelligent assistant at hand to provide answers to those all important questions - from choosing the best stocks to invest in, to deciding what movie to watch tonight!

All that could become reality sooner than you might think if IBM’s latest artificial intelligence project pans out. The $4.9 million Cognitive Computing via Synaptronics and Supercomputing (C2S2) project teams up IBM with five US universities to create a neural network computer system that can feel, think and make decisions just like a brain does.

The idea behind the C2S2 project is to mimic the very highly interconnected network of neurons found in real brains, in order to build a machine that can analyze vast amounts of data in a flash and make split second decisions. This sounds like something straight out of a science fiction movie, but may soon be science fact.

Such an artificial intelligence computer brain would use much less power than your PC, and IBM’s researchers hope to make it even more efficient than an actual brain by using nanotechnology components to make synapses and neurons that are even smaller than those found in nature.

Those of you looking forward to your own artificial friend will have to settle for something simple at first - C2S2’s long-term goal is to create a brain with the complexity of a cat’s. Very impressive nontheless!

If you think the Internet was invented in the 80s or 90s, you could not be more wrong!

Did you know that a Belgian visionary called Paul Otlet had already come up with the concept of the Internet way back in 1934, and also imagined computers with a windowed working environment where the screen shows several documents at once? The first time I heard this, I had to double check it to make sure it was not a hoax.

Well, I just came across this short video about Paul Otlet’s futuristic visions as he explains them in his ‘Treatise on Documentation’, and thought I’d share. Prepare to be amazed as Otlet predicts a multimedia-rich experience complete with video, text and audio at a time when few people had ever used a telephone and even crappy black and white TV was still a good way off!

Makes you wonder what will technology look like 60 or 70 years from now!