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Recovered from a 1st-century Roman shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera Mechanism is the world’s oldest known analog computer, at an estimated 2,200 years old. While the device’s mechanism has long since been known to have involved astronomical calculations, its full nature has been shrouded in mystery, with the mechanism’s approximately 30 bronze gears having corroded into a single lump over the millennia that it lay on the seafloor. However, new examinations by a multi-national research team have deciphered nearly all of the surviving text that had been inscribed on the device by its builder from ancient Greece.
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One important aspect in the evolution of electronics is the continued miniaturization of our devices: we now have devices that can be kept in one’s pocket that are more powerful than the massive supercomputers from a mere thirty years ago. While the mobility of our electronic abacuses have allowed them to become more and more convenient, researchers are working to find ways to make them even more unobtrusive, including finding new ways to wear them simply as another layer of our own skin.
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Despite whatever scenarios that can be speculated on in our culture’s works of fiction regarding artificial intelligence, the intelligence that emerges from this field of research may very well be utterly alien to what we might expect. It could be beneficent, malevolent, calculatingly cold, or it could even see compassion as the pinnacle of logic. Two recent developments in the field of AI research illustrate two completely diametric paths that a future artificial mind could take.
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