Feeds:Monday, Finals Week
"Watching Johnny Depp movies will not help you pass finals week. It might get you through finals week, but you will not pass." - Nancy, 03/06/2005
"You'd build a robot, give it a tongue so it could talk, just to hear somebody say, 'It'll be OK.'"
So I've been getting complaints about the quality of my procrastination recently; that is to say, there are those, among whom might exist certain individuals with a greater-than-moderate amount of influence over me, who are of a belief that I have not posted enough recently.
I say ye "Fie!" I posted only a week ago. I've gone longer in silence than that. Bah.
So the crushing weight of Artificial Intelligence projects and studying I will do today is a nice tie-in to something I've been meaning to talk about. The other day, in class, Ms. Levow was discussing various problems of machine speech laerning, including grammatical atrocities commited by the input base. An exact quote was "They were produced by a person, so they should be an acceptable string." This struck me as an odd sort of discrimination; are humans inherently superior to computers? What would you call such a discrimination? 'Humanism' and 'Naturalism' are both already meaningful, as is, from different tack, 'Autism'. What, then? Organicism? Carbonism?
Moreover, lately I've been engrossed in reading Brian Herbert's Dune prequils regarding the war of humanity to free itself from the 'thinking machines'. In these books, someone had given their AI systems too much power, and they had immediately taken over first that world, then most others, and played an antagonistic role towards humanity. More questions are raised by this, of course. Are computer 'scientists' (hey, folks, I know a misnomer when I see one) going to bring about the end of the world? Will AI ever reach the advanced levels experienced in so much science fiction; could we ever actually create artificial sentience, and if so, what is to prevent it from becoming malevolent or antagonistic? (I know some people would say that computers are already antagonistic, but that's beside the point.)
In this discusson, the distinction between artificial intelligence and artificial sentience is critical. Intelligent systems are already common; they analyse data and make decisions, some of them are capable of learning. They are not, however, conscious, not what we typically mean when we say 'self-aware'. They have no sense of anything that is not hard-coded or inputted into them; they follow imperitives according to their programming. This is not to say that they do not have an awareness of themselves at all, or that they lack any sense of self-preservation; both can be programmed into the system. Take, for example, a learning system that modifies itself based on new input: it knows what and where it is, and can change itself. Take, for example, clever viruses: They are coded to hide and reproduce, propogating themselves, keeping themselves, as it were, 'alive'. Now, neither system cares about either motivation; they simply do what is in their nature until they are stopped.
Artificial sentience, on the other hand, is a scary thing. This is where almost all 'robot horror' scifi draws its core from. 2001: A Space Odyssey, that I, Robot movie, and many more. By giving something like a computer free will, the gates are opened for whole new possibilities, and it is human fascination with the horrible that does the rest.
Which leads to other questions. Is it possible to have a being possed of free will, but not of a soul? Do the two go hand-in-hand? Would a sentient computer be capable of faith? Would they become like us, knowing good from evil, having been forced by their creators to partake of that damning fruit whose story we are all familiar with?
Is it in us, as humans, to create creatures after our own image?
....
"I am immortal, I have inside me blood of kings."
I had wished also to discuss the nature of discrimination today, but I think I've said enough things for now. I do, after all, have work to do.
And this time, I don't mean arson.
Comments have closed.