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- PARIS (AFP) - White advanced
a pawn to c4. Black threw up his hands and resigned. It was the end of
an era. Man had taken on the microchip and lost.
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- The man in question, world chess champion Gary Kasparov,
stomped off in a fit of very human pique.
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- The microchip, embedded in an IBM computer called Deep
Blue, refrained from histrionics. Its victory, the triumph of artificial
intelligence over grey matter, marked the day -- May 11, 1997 -- that information
technology came of age.
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- Deep Blue, we were reminded, couldnt write like Shakespeare,
dance like Nureyev or act like Olivier. Small consolation. Frankenstein
had finally been superseded by his monster.
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- The pace of technological change in this century has
been breath-taking.
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- When Max Planck was sitting at his kitchen table in Berlin
in 1900, putting the finishing touches to his epoch-making quantum theory,
the only computer in the house was himself.
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- As he turned round to reach for a snack, there was no
refrigerator to open, or any other electrical appliance for that matter.
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- There were no airplanes overhead, no cars on the streets.
The thought processes which inspired the young Albert Einstein were unhindered
by radios or record-players, telephones or televisions.
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- A year later, three little pips heralded the communications
revolution that would change all that.
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- "I placed the single earphone to my ear and started
listening," recalled Gugliemo Marconi in 1902. "I heard faintly,
but distinctly, pip-pip-pip."
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- The pips, the letter "S" in Morse code, had
travelled across the Atlantic to St. John's, Newfoundland, from Cornwall,
England and wireless communication was about to change the world.
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- Henry Ford, inventor of the first petrol-driven car in
1893, confirmed his status as America's greatest inventor in 1913 by setting
up the first moving assembly line. Mass production was born, enabling us
to get our hands on as many Model-T Fords, baked beans or lap-top computers
as our pockets allowed.
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- In 1926 John Logie Baird, forced by ill-health to sit
at home and tinker, produced the first flickering images of what became
another of the century's defining inventions: television.
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- The world wars were the catalyst for huge technological
advances.
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- After Orville Wright piloted the Kitty Hawk bi-plane
for a historic 12-second flight in 1903, he accepted US army backing to
found the Wright Aeroplane Company six years later.
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- World War II in particular provided ammunition both to
those who saw technological advance as the key to progress and those who
feared the capacity for ever greater tragedy -- what H.G. Wells saw as
"a race between education and catastrophe."
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- Already in 1942 Orville Wright warned against "the
use of a beneficial invention for diabolical purposes." What he feared
came about, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in 1945 opened up a moral debate which is still raging.
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- Mathematician Alan Turing also believed he was working
to end war when he helped create "Colossus", the German codebreaking
computer.
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- Deep Blue's primitive ancestor was the size of a barn
and a Neanderthal compared to todays lap-tops. Nowadays the average American
household contains more computing power than existed worldwide only 30
years previously.
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- The space race -- launched by the Russians with the Sputnik
satellite in 1957, won conclusively by the United States with the moon
landing in 1969 -- brought further innovation: new plastics, new medical
techniques, mobile phones and microwave ovens.
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- Perhaps more importantly, it also brought a clearer understanding
of the earths fragility, boosting the ecology movement and the push for
"clean technology".
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- Also in 1969, communications technology was changed forever
when the Pentagon -- again, with military purposes in mind -- inaugurated
the internet, a device which has since become as much a part of civilian
life as the telephone or the television.
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- In a rapidly-changing world scarred by frequent wars,
technology now gives rise to as much apprehension as appreciation, and
the perennial row over whether it is to be seen as sinner or saviour has
found a new battleground -- the natural sciences.
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- Whether over human cloning, genetically modified tomatoes
or the morning-after contraceptive pill, successive breakthroughs give
rise to fierce antagonisms.
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- As the writer Arthur C. Clarke put it, "for every
expert, there is an equal and opposite expert."
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- At the dawn of a new century, man can look forward --
hopefully or in dread, according to inclination -- to technological advances
hardly dreamed of a generation ago.
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- Among the developments said to be lined up (though only
time will tell if they get beyond the realm of science fiction) are computer
implants to improve memory, holidays on the moon, the cloning of spare
body parts, pollution-free energy sources, and life expectancy nudging
100 years.
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- On the other hand, man could destroy the planet at the
flick of a switch or smother it gradually with the by-products of technological
change.
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- Even if he gets it right, the real challenge, as Harvard
entomologist Edward O. Wilson said in 1978, is -- what will he do with
it?
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- "It could be that in the next 100 years humankind
will thread the needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and
materials crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction.
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- "The world can at least hope for a stable ecosystem
and a well-nourished population. But what then?"
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