But when the machines became smart enough, they lost their jobs as human computers.
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Over the centuries, we have applied some of the ingenuity used to analyze data about nature to building things that calculate data, whether organizations of human computers or machines of integrated circuits.
Rather than emulating the complex thought-processes of human players, computers simply resort to mindless number-crunching to decide what move to make.
While Siri is hardly perfect, it suggests the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs managed to define what may be the next and most amazing era in human interaction with computers.
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It was once believed that computers could never beat the best human at chess, because computers perform very inefficient brute force attacks on problems, instead of relying on intuition and hierarchical structures like our brains do.
So smaller specialist firms, such as Wavemetrix in Britain and Nielsen BuzzMetrics in America, are now using a combination of computers and human researchers.
In their study, just published in Computers in Human Behavior, they say that Dr Mori's ideas of familiarity and comfort level do not properly get at the quality of uncanniness.
But Delgado's goal was to let governments use computers to control human behavior.
John Donoghue of Brown University described his work connecting computers directly to the human brain.
David Barrett, of Gemini Consulting in London, thinks that, eventually, a solution would be to replace human air-traffic controllers with computers.
Never before have there been quite so many computers in the average human's life: PCs, smartphones and tablets, digital cars, digital homes, even digital organs.
So even though companies like IBM are working on so-called cognitive computers that would mimic human learning and reasoning, there is no chance we will see autonomous drones that can survive the rigors of aerial combat anytime soon.
The competition among traders using electronic systems to offer and seek liquidity has made retail and institutional traders much better off now that they are being served by highly efficient computers instead of by human dealers and brokers.
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Nor are there enough computers and software tripwires and human agents to deal with this level of complexity.
For decades researchers have tried replicating the top-down, hierarchical model of the human brain to create artificial intelligence in computers, without success.
It all brings us closer to the complementary goals of understanding human learning in computational terms and building computers that learn like humans.
Questionnaires and computers can never replace the human side of investing.
While such a step may seem intrusive and unnecessary, Nass, who specializes in the social psychology of technology and explores similar themes in a new book, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: How Computers Can Teach Us About Human Relationships, says the potential benefits are vast.
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The demonstration showed off the latest in affective computing, a research field attempting to teach computers to understand and adapt to human emotion.
After all, a single human brain has more switches than all of the computers and routers and internet connections on our planet.
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The result is data that goes directly into computers that fire off trades with almost no human interaction.
The problem, according to many security researchers, is that computers are now capable of far too many human abilities.
Unless we completely delegate all our investment decision making to computers, markets will still be impacted by human emotions.
Is an human-level AI likely to beat the best chess computers at chess?
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The problem is that the intensity of the radio waves needed to charge mobile phones and laptop computers over long distances might be hazardous to human health, and regulators would be unlikely to approve.
In a 2011 article for the scholarly journal Science, researchers Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez estimated that the entire processing power of the world's stock of general-purpose computers in 2007 more or less equaled that of one human brain (about 6.4 quintillion instructions per second -- the standard measure of computer speed).
Computers can not only perform repetitive mental tasks much faster than human beings.
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The important thing that we need to understand about computers and artificial intelligence is that they are not competitors for human beings.
The Southampton researchers have now developed 'machine learning' traffic control computers that can learn how to control the lights like a human would and even learn their own improved strategies through experience.
Like we do, computers keep secrets important, valuable secrets from human resources and customer data to intellectual property.
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