Одиннадцатый текст
The World's New Millennium
A thousand years ago, when mankind approached the end of the first millennium, some pCC^l? feasted, some people prayed, some people thought the world was coming to an end — and the vast majority thought nothing of it at all because they had very little grasp of the calendar. But the 20th century, which began as the Century of Total War and grew into the Atomic Era seems to be ending as the Age of Entertainment. And the 21st century offers prospects well worth celebrating. Science and medicine, surely the two great success stories of the past 100 years, are poised for fresh advances, exploring both the unimaginable frontiers of the universe and the microscopic secrets of the human body and the potential of computers has transformed our work habits, our politics, our style of life. International affairs, though speckled with trouble spots, have settled for the moment into what might be called a PAX ECONOMICA, as rich and poor nations alike work together. The portents of the future do seem much more favorable now than at most stages of a century disfigured with blood and ruin. Predicting the future has always been a risky business. Historically, the great discoverers and inventors were often regarded by their contemporaries as quacks or even heretics. In 1930, American rocket researcher Robert H. Goddart and a group of colleagues were given a grant of $25,000 by philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim to develop rocket technology to carry scientific instruments into earthy upper atmosphere. But, fearful of losing their professional reputations and being branded cranks, the scientists emphatically denied the possibility of ever reaching the moon. In 1977 Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., saw "no reason why anyone would want a computer in their homeff. Now many people around the world can't live without them.
But true pioneers - people like Socrates, Voltaire, Newton-and Einstein -have consistently had the courage of their convictions; the vision to ask the right questions and the determination to keep on asking until they got satisfactory answers. Some may welcome the projected developments listed here as important advances in our knowledge of the world and our ability to improve the quality of7 our lives; others may consider them of questionable merit and regard them with some alarm. In either case, it is clear that the pace of innovation is quickening as we enter the 21st century. HERFS WHAT SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS HAS IN STORE FOR US IN THE COMING CENTURIES:
2005 - The active contact lens, linked to the Internet, allows the wearer the read E-mail and surf the World Wide Web without even opening their eyes.
2006 - Clothes made from smart fabrics automatically warm up the wearer in cold weather and cool him or her down in hot weather.
2007 * New cars are equipped with anti-collision radar, thermal imaging systems to improve visibility, on-board computers that detect and warn drivers about imminent faults, and satellite-based automatic global positioning systems.
2010 - Robotic pets, programmed to recognize their master's voice and face, operate and control all the computerized functions of the household.
2016 - The holographic telephone projects a life-size holographic image of the person being called.
2025 - Computers connected directly to the brain are able to recognize and respond to thoughts, obviating the need for the manual input of data and commands.
2030 - Human hibernation is used for the first time in long-distance space travel.
2044 - Microscopic robots capable of reproducing themselves are devised using nanotechnology.
2050 - From an average of 78 years, human life-spans are extended to 140 years. By Kate Noble, TIME, July 2000
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Двенадцатый текст
Your wish is my machine code
Writing software is a painstaking business in which you can't afford to slip up: get a single cnmaCle: wrong and the instructions either do nothing or go horribly wrong. Now a new system that takes the drudgery out vasmg is about to be launched. Its inventor hopes it will one day
turn us all into programmers. u
Bob Brennan, a software engineer at Cambridge-based start-up Synapse Soiutions,;.Tias developed a piece of software that allows you to write a program by keying in what you want it to do in everyday language, Dubbed MI-Tech -'short for machine intelligence technology -the software translates a typed wish list into machine code, the basic mathematical language understood by the microprocessors inside computers. But this is no easy task, because everyday language is riddled with double meanings. "MI-Tech can resolve these riddles," claims Brennan, because it has been taught about the significance of context in the English language.
At the heart of MI-Tech is a store of logical rules. These allow it to extract instructions from statements in ordinary language, which it then translates into machine code. In its present form, MI- I Tech has a limited lexicon of only a few hundred words, but Brennan claims this is sufficient for
most of the tasks you might ask it to carry out. Brennan says his program can write code in a fraction of the time that it takes trained programmers. He spent months writing a program manually, producing hundreds of pages of code. But given fjust three pages of monologue", MI-Tech generated a program that performed exactly the same tasks.
Brennan is not going into any detail about how the system works until his patents are granted. But he hopes to be licensing his program to software companies within 18 months so that they can build it into their own packages. If that happens, you might well be able to add programs of your own design to your PC - without knowing how to code. By Duncan Graham-Rowe
