Germany out ahead again

The news that the new (compulsory) German ID card will be RFID equipped (International Business Times 21 August: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/44536/20100821/identity-cards-with-rfid-chip-on-track-in-germany.htm) is a step change towards John McCarthy of Stanford’s remark 40 years ago that the solution to the problem of crime was the Government knowing where each of us at any time. It is not compulsory to cary the ID card in Germany yet, but since a driving licence is not valid identification, most people do. Almost there…..!


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About

Yorick Wilks is a Senior Research Fellow at the OII, and a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield. He received his M. A. and Ph.D. (1968) from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has also taught or researched at Stanford, Edinburgh, Geneva, Essex and New Mexico State Universities. His interests are artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief, and in particular the notion of conversational Companion agents as a new type of interface to the Internet. His recent books include: Artificial Believers (Erlbaum 1991), Electric Words (MIT, 1996) and Machine Conversations (Kluwer, 2001), Machine Translation: its scope and limits (Springer, 2008), and Close Encounters with Artificial Companions (John Benjamins, 2010). He is a Fellow of the European and American Societies for Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of of the EPSRC College of Computing, a member of the UK Computing Research Council, and a Fellow of the ACM. He won the Zampolli Prize in 2008, and the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal in 2009.