Isaac Asimov's predictions 50 years on

Re:Isaac Asimov's predictions 50 years on by Tyrannosaurs on Tuesday April 22, 2014 @06:17AM (#7626759)

Some of those were obviously never going to happen in those timescales though. Automated cars by 2000? As an undergraduate doing a work with image recognition in the early 90s I could have told you that that required component alone wouldn't be up to the required standard in 10 years and probably not 20.

Similarly automatic translation. These are just tough problems that will take time to solve and even in the heady anything-is-possible-90s that was obvious to anyone who had the remotest understanding of what they were dealing with.

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Re:Isaac Asimov's predictions 50 years on by bostonpete on Tuesday April 22, 2014 @12:33PM (#7628652)

> As an undergraduate doing a work with image recognition

The "vision" for automated cars at the time didn't involve image recognition -- it involved sensors in the road and on each car. The technology for this was certainly available by 2000, but the justification for such a massive investment in infrastructure was not.

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Re:Isaac Asimov's predictions 50 years on by Tyrannosaurs on Tuesday April 22, 2014 @06:20PM (#7630863)

How would that work for avoiding pedestrians, animals or any of the other things not conveniently tagged?

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Re:Isaac Asimov's predictions 50 years on by Houshalter on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @04:59AM (#7632915)

I recently read about a self-driving car that was built using only machine vision by a neural network, in the 1990s. I was very surprised such a thing existed at all back then.

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