Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to us

O’Reilly Network: Googling Your Email [Oct. 07, 2002]

At InfoWorld’s recent Web services conference, Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin gave a keynote talk. Afterward, somebody asked him to weigh in on RDF and the semantic Web. “Look,” he said, “putting angle brackets around everything is not a technology, by itself. I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than to force humans to write in ways computers can understand.”

Sergey Brin and Jon Udell are smart guys, but then I always say that about people who agree with me:

What this sounds like to me is that computer scientists want to — still — require us to learn a language that computers can handle (like typing, for example: if typing were a natural motion, would we have Carpal Tunnel?) as opposed to taking the tremendous power now available — cheap 1 and 2 GHz CPUs — and making the machines meet us halfway for once.