Computing power has long grown at an exponential rate. That rapid advance has allowed digital systems to do more each year. Computer power crossed a major threshold when it made “Artificial Intelligence” driven by deep neural networks economically feasible. And huge investments are being made in ever-larger computer centers to support AI. This book challenges the assumptions behind those huge investments and explains why the generative AI that is making all the news is over-rated.
Computer power crossing a threshold allowed deep neural nets to be practical, and they have indeed been used effectively for many limited applications. Meisel discusses the “next big thing” that exponential growth in computer processing speed will allow. The book provides a realistic description of what we can expect as computer power grows ever more quickly than most past innovations, with major impacts on society, the economy, and competition between countries.
William Meisel, PhD, was an early researcher in AI, with an PhD dissertation on neural networks and an early book on computer pattern recognition, the latter while a professor of EE and CS at USC. He then applied those techniques as the head of the computer science division of a defense company for a decade. He then founded and ran Speech Systems Incorporated, developing speech recognition technology and applications, for a decade. He then published Speech Recognition Update, a monthly paid-subscription, no-ads newsletter on commercial developments in speech recognition and natural language processing for more than twenty years and held conferences on the subject. He was also Executive Director of the non-profit Applied Voice Input Output Society during this period.
He is currently an independent consultant and author. His recent books include Computing Power Drives the Future, The Lost History of Talking to Computers and Evolution Continues: A Human-Computer Partnership.
