Earth sciences

The Earth sciences deal with the history of our planet. This kind of knowledge becomes increasingly involved in improving our understanding of the factors controlling the global environment and in developing more effective ways of finding and assessing natural resources, energy, and water. Methods for the prediction of natural events such as Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, floods or El Niño have been greatly improved. Furthermore, important insights into the history of the Earth’s climate have been obtained through the analysis of sedimentary records or ice cores from Greenland. Such knowledge will be important to disentangle global change caused by human beings from naturally occurring variations in the global climate system.

Another important development in the Earth sciences took place in the 1950s, when the theory of plate tectonics was empirically confirmed. Although an earlier version of this theory had already been formulated in the beginning of the 20^th century, it was largely ignored because no-one could imagine the kind of forces necessary for pushing continents, or even the giant tectonic plates that supposedly make up the Earth’s crust.

Earth science will continue to play an essential role in diagnosing and addressing some of the most pressing challenges, such as climate change and sustainable resource allocation that the global community faces.

Module 6 Unit 2

1. What will computers be like?

Speaker1:

Computers will not exist as we know them today. We will have artificial intelligence in every appliance, car, and home running the basic processes so we are left with nothing but an interface using voice, VR, and tactile response systems. The computers will all have voice recognition, fuzzy query input systems, and all information will be found by the computer, not the human based on the current task and interest and the history of the user’s responses.

Speaker2:

The computer will cease to be a box/CRT/keyboard on a desk and become as much another piece of furniture, or a household appliance. I believe we wouldn’t (shouldn’t) ever give computers total control over our lives, but the role computers will play will be much more automated that it is now. We will train them in what to do, what to look for, when to butt it, etc.

Speaker 3

One computer will only need a one inch chip to run. Everything and everybody will be connected to the Internet. All humans will become lazy. All shopping: food, electronics, clothes and so on will be done over computer. Work will be done over computer. Like if you are a constructor, and you are constructing a building, you just give a few commands in the computer and the robots on the land will be making the building. Cooking will be done by robots over computer, or better yet, it will be making itself.

2. How will we communicate with computers?

Speaker 1

We will have voice input for most applications, but VR will play a big roll in information manipulation and Cyberspace navigation. Keyboards and mice will give way to tactile gloves and eye-tracking movement headgear.

Speaker 2

No more typing. Everything will be done via voice recognition. If you say in about 500 years, everything will be done telepathically. No one will be talking or moving or not.

Speaker 3

Get rid of that keyboard. I can’t think of a more antiquated method of interacting

with even the PCs we have today. They will be replaced by voice-recognition, or perhaps neural-stimulus, and in the worst case scenario, some kind of device that can reproduce letters/ words/concepts with combinations of key presses. As the computer turns us into an international community, QWERTY keyboards will have to go away to allow common interface support for all languages.

3. Are we going to spend our whole time in Cyberspace?

Speaker 1

It depends upon the development of nanotechnology. To make a virtual reality that you never need to leave, you’re going to have to take care of bodily functions somehow – yet with nanotechnology, you can scan the entire brain into a computer, and make it operate there, so you have no physical body to bother with.

Speaker 2

Some people will, just as some people now spend most of their free time in front of the TV. But for the majority it will be maybe a few hours per day, just like most people watch TV for only a few hours per day. The people that use the net will probably watch less TV, so the total time spent on media will probably be mostly unchanged.

Speaker 3

No, because (at least for most people) there is no substitute for being face to face. We’re social animals, and we need other people around us.

4. Will computers be intelligent?

Speaker 1

That depends on what you mean by intelligence. If you mean anything that resembles human intelligence, I doubt it. While computers have become faster and bigger (and will continue to do so), we are not much better at programming them than we were 30 years ago, and most programmers use languages that would look familiar to programmers in 1965.

Speaker 2

Intelligence they already have! We can make computers more intelligent than humans in specific areas – for example, computers have proven far better at measuring gender from a photo than humans (you know those guys with long hair, you can’t really tell if they’re guys or not? A neural network can!)

Conciousness, however, is hard to predict, because it’s so hard to define!

Speaker 3

Computers will become Thinkers by 2020 but they will not be intelligent until 2050.

(Adapted from: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~brendy/future.html)

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14