Will computers ever feel responsible?

Bold technology predictions pave the road to humility. Even titans like Albert Einstein own a billboard or two along that humbling freeway. In a classic example, John von Neumann, who pioneered modern computer architecture, wrote in 1949, "It would appear that we have reached the limits of what is possible to achieve with computer technology." Among the myriad manifestations of computational limit-busting that have defied von Neumann's prediction is the social psychologist Frank Rosenblatt's 1958 model of a human brain's neural network. He called his device, based on the IBM 704 mainframe computer, the "Perceptron" and trained it to recognize simple patterns.