An expert system (in other words software) that does bankruptcy filings in California was cited by a California appeals court for practicing law without a license! The decisions it made were held to constitute attorney-like services as traditionally defined.
This was a pretty basic case, but expect much more of this over the next 20 years as computers approach, match and surpass human expertise in many areas.
Interview with Tony Tether from Darpa
We're on the verge of having computers with densities approaching a monkey's brain, and it won't be long before we'll have a computer with the density of transistors, or equivalent to neurons and almost human. What we're missing is the architecture. So it seemed like it was time. We had great advances in algorithms for reasoning and in algorithms that learned in general. At the same time, the computers, the actual intrinsic hardware, was really approaching the density of a human brain.
Long, but great article about a remarkable organization. Note for the record...your desktop PC has the processing power of a mosquito.
From Wired News
Datacenter in a shipping container. Sun Project Blackbox
Totally self-contained.
The Project Blackbox prototype is a computing powerhouse capable of hosting a configuration that would place it among the top 200 fastest supercomputers globally
Capable of 147 Teraflops, 10,000 simulataneous desktop users, 7 terabytes of RAM, 1.5 petabytes of HDD
Sun, for a company that spends every other half-decade on the ropes, has always been an innovator. This thing is legitimately cool.
Who wins with this thing? Large corps primarily. Sun CEO has the scoop
Who loses? Data center operators (I guess), Google (in some highly theoretical sense in that it might be easier to build a datacenter, but Google is so far ahead in their homegrown application virtualization platform that I doubt this is meaningful)
This project has been the subject of ongoing rumors re: Googlenet since Eric S. is from Sun.
The thought process? Google plants these around country, links its dark fiber, voila, you have an ISP competitor. I have never seen credible analysis of whether or not this is an economically reasonable exercise. Google denies that this thought has crossed their mind (of course).
But that is a story for another day: Google v. the ISPs re: net neutrality.