Predictions made by Ray Kurzweil to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament. Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of "The Age of Intelligent Machines", there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was often unreliable outside academic, military, corporate and other heavily invested settings, difficult for non-technical users to use, and mostly lacking a broad range
What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is the seventh studio album from The Decemberists, released on January 20, 2015. The album's title comes from a line in the song "12/17/12", a reference to the date of Barack Obama's speech in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and lead singer Colin Meloy's conflicting feelings about the shooting and his happy personal life. "What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World" received mostly positive reviews. It currently has a metascore of 77 and user score of 8.1 from Metacritic. "The