I became operational... in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.Inspiredby HAL's self-proclaimed birth date, HAL's Legacy reflects upon science fiction'smost famous computer and explores the relationship between science fantasy andtechnological fact. The informative, nontechnical chapters written especially forthis book describe many of the areas of computer science critical to the design ofintelligent machines, discuss whether scientists in the 1960s were accurate aboutthe prospects for advancement in their fields, and look at how HAL has influencedscientific research.Contributions by leading scientists look at the technologiesthat would be critical if we were, as Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick imaginedthirty years ago, to try and build HAL in 1997: supercomputers, fault-tolerance andreliability, planning, artificial intelligence, lipreading, speech recognition andsynthesis, commonsense reasoning, the ability to recognize and display emotion, andhuman-machine interaction. A separate chapter by philosopher Daniel Dennettconsiders the ethical implications of intelligent machines.