Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The challenge...

Heather set it up - find a sci fi in which AI, or the like, ended well and humanity suffered naught...


I can't recall one, so I'm doing some research.  Here's my tribute to the weird things you find on any search, I'm not too sure what to make of this article, or the website itself, but if you follow the "singularity" wiki link from the "About" section you find one of the greatest fears of the God Sci Fi realm.

And this quote "The WWW trilogy is my attempt to revisit that question, and see whether there is a plausible way for us to survive the advent of nonhuman superintelligent while still retaining our essential humanity and individuality." Leads me to think that this book may do it, though I haven't read it myself, happy to see we have a copy in Admin!

I think AI would mostly be given a bad rap because of our inherent control-freak natures.  We don't understand how most things work in our world, but we trust that someone, somewhere, some-what like us does understand how it works and can control it or fix it.  What happens if someone non-human has a say in how our world works? How would human interests be of most imortance  to a non-human mind?  Is it residual guilt - look how badly we have treated the world, would someone else assess the needs of the planet ahead of our need?

Ok, i'm going to go read a kids book - this is hurting my brain.


4 comments:

Hettie Betty said...

anyone see SBS news on Monday night I think it was?
There was a story on robots and a study going on about them doing human jobs and having feeling etc. There was mention of a robot bomber who could make decisions on which building to blow up and who was the 'enemy.' Crazee.

Hettie Betty said...

Oh, also, did anyone see Top Gear on Monday night (see what I do when netball is off?) when they interviewed Simon Pegg who wrote an essay at uni on Star Wars and Marxism- where he said C3PO represented emasculated man because he was so camp and had no genitals. I just remembered whilst reading the article Nicole posted. Poor robots, I suppose all machinery is designed to make our lives easier- washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers- so ROBOTS would of course follow in this way and are doomed to begin existence as slaves. They would (and have) certainly made the lives of slaves easier. They are already off to a bad start in their relationship with humans.
But if there is an uprising- we could just turn them off right?

Nic said...

Depends on if they are smarter than us...

Nic said...
This comment has been removed by the author.