Assignment- Drowning in a Sea of Information Essay

Assignment- Drowning in a Sea of Information - Essay Example computers. While information overload is certainly a reality, artificial intelligence and other mechanisms which allow the sorting and prioritization of information can help in reducing this burden. In essence, the problem is to develop such systems which are as intelligent or perhaps more intelligent than human beings. The business side of the problem of information overload can be handled through data mining and the application of relevance which allow companies and business professional to decide which information is important and which is not. At the present time in the field of artificial intelligence, it is reasonable to say that while some AI systems mimic human intelligence, there is no system in the world which surpasses a human in all aspects of thought, intelligence or even social interaction. However, it is also plausible to say that the rate of development of current machines means that at some point the future, there will certainly be a time when AI based systems become more intelligent than the humans who created them in the first place. Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) presents a very detailed look at the future of artificial intelligence in terms of where they are going and what can be expected of them in coming decades. He focuses on machine intelligence and shows that the evolution of machines has taken a similar path to the evolution of biological creatures but at a much more accelerated pace. Kurzweil describes how computational and processing power has grown exponentially in the past and records were broken as expectations were shattered. For instance, it was once thought that no computer would ever be able to beat a grand master champion at chess but the best human player in the world has been defeated by a computer specifically created for that purpose. For machines which are specifically created to handle