Just a case in point for what I wrote in my last post. Over in the Spiegel magazine an article (in German) about the Darpa Grand Challenge where more civilian oriented technology beat out more military oriented technology. 

Via Tim O'Reilly I found a reference to a recent George Dyson talk on Turing's Cathedral. It talks about how von Neumann's model in computing is going to be displaced by Google/search engines because "All the answers in the known universe are there, and some very ingenious algorithms are in place to map them to questions that people ask." and this is going to help avoid having to have addressing and make computing more robust.

I don't quite see this yet - there is still a huge semantic gap between what is found by search engines and what a computer can use for automatic processing. Every search engine user does this semantic work when browsing through the search results and picking the links that most likely contain answers to what the user "meant" with the query.

Which reminds me that I should probably get back to working on the search engine that is due as homework in two weeks ;-)

Nevertheless a good read and source of an insightful quote from Turing regarding AI: "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children, [...] Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."