Headline: "Google Transforms Into Hal"

The following dyslectic paragraph appeared in my e-mail today:

“I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.”

I don’t know what kind of stroke results in the above, but I hope it doesn’t happen to me. I’ve noticed that my typing is getting a little worse, especially when I’m tired. I find myself occasionally transposing the two center letters in a four letter wrod, but I don’t think I ahve eevr tolltay scrweed up a logner wrod like smoe of toshe abvoe.

Thankfully my mind hasn’t devolved to that point yet, although it does appear to be heading that way. I suppose if I wanted to keep track of the slow demise of brain cells I could turn off “spell check as you type” and just activate it at the end of a page. That way I could keep tabs on how many words I misspell and gauge my mental acuity on a weekly basis. Forget it. Too much self awareness can be a bad thing.

You have to admit, it is amazing how the brain adapts – how you can actually read that first paragraph without that much trouble. The human brain is still an awesome bit of engineering any way you look at it. It’s also not likely to be upstaged anytime soon; certainly not by a pitiful little appliance like the one I’m typing on.

So, I’m thinking, what is the state of computing power today? Aren’t we getting close to duplicating the power of a human mind in silicon? No? What if you took the entire internet of connected computers and they could somehow communicate with each other independent of their human operators? Wouldn’t that be something if it didn’t self-destruct? You could even call it Hal. Maybe then you would have an entity that approaches the computing power and intrepretive genius of the homo-sapien brain.

Yesterday I happened upon a blog post that explained very clearly how to put your pants on. I found this both humorous and informative. If such a simple explanation for virtually everything that we need to do on a daily basis were available somewhere on the internet, then heck, Hal could conceivably rule the world!

You would just need some sort of incredible indexing system and probably some way to decide what is worthwhile and what is crap. That last bit is going to be the hardest, given the preponderance of crap out there.

No dobut Golgoe has sotimenhg in the wroks - of cruose wtih a mroe clveer nmae tahn Hal.