POLL: Is A Terminator Scenario Possible?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')avid Brin is a SF and non-fiction writer. Among his most influential books are The Uplift War, Earth, The Postman, and the non-fictional The Transparent Society
Of course such a calamity is possible, and nightmares are great fun, in fiction and film. Still, look at the premise. Superficially, the lesson is the same one that the late Michael Crichton taught, every time: "If man sticks his hand where it wasn't meant to go, it will get cut off!" It is the old warning against hubris, as ancient as Gilgamesh. But look closer. From Terminator to Jurassic Park to The Matrix and so on, the real back-story is that the terrible new mistake -- like AI or resurrected dinosaurs -- was done in secret... and as stupidly as possible.
It's easy to see why this is done so often. A director's #1 need is to get the hero into dire, pulse-pounding jeopardy as quickly as possible! Preferably against some overwhelming authority figure for the audience to hate, and for the hero to bring down, with little more than guts, defiance and sheer will. Hey, I can dig it. I've gone to that well myself. And the surest trick is to assume, from the start, that civilization failed. That nobody blew a whistle, no professionals checked things out, no institutions functioned and that masses of bright citizens never had a clue. Hey, it could go down that way!
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Is A Terminator Scenario Possible?
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Is A Terminator Scenario Possible?
by Carlhole » Mon 25 May 2009, 12:14:25
Maybe Earth's swollen humn population it sort of like a pregnancy condition: the birth of intelligent occurs right about the same time as a drastic decline in human populations?
'ssshwwwwwiiiit... pphh...phhh... .... ...... 'ere.
Last edited by Carlhole on Tue 26 May 2009, 09:27:40, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: POLL: Is A Terminator Scenario Possible?
by TWilliam » Mon 25 May 2009, 12:22:47
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'm')asses of bright citizens
Ok, that's where ya lost me...
"It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas? Is goin' bye-bye... "
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Re: POLL: Is A Terminator Scenario Possible?
by ian807 » Mon 25 May 2009, 14:38:02
Um... No.
An AI is not a human. There won't be any instincts (i.e. programming) equivalent to those necessary for a product of an evolutionary process.
An AI will have no inherent compulsion to eat, reproduce, survive, or experience any type of cognitive proxy (i.e. emotions, pain, etc.) that would motivate it to act, unless we *put* such a proxy in place.
AI's will eventually give us many answers and create a revolution in human existence, but their intelligence will no more resemble ours than a helicopter resembles a sparrow because both happen to fly.
As for Terminator? Loved the movie.
An AI is not a human. There won't be any instincts (i.e. programming) equivalent to those necessary for a product of an evolutionary process.
An AI will have no inherent compulsion to eat, reproduce, survive, or experience any type of cognitive proxy (i.e. emotions, pain, etc.) that would motivate it to act, unless we *put* such a proxy in place.
AI's will eventually give us many answers and create a revolution in human existence, but their intelligence will no more resemble ours than a helicopter resembles a sparrow because both happen to fly.
As for Terminator? Loved the movie.
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Re: POLL: Is A Terminator Scenario Possible?
by ian807 » Mon 25 May 2009, 20:07:13
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'A')I is an absolute bust and always swill be.
People assume intelligent is encapsulated in a particular bit of cell structure called the brain or the neural net. This is reductionist crap that makes our techtopian dreams for immortality possible. But it is nonsence.
If anything we are holograms. Cut out a piece of the brain and intelligence somewhere else is still expressed. In the nerves of the spinal cord for instance. Watch a headless chicken run.
Build and program a fly to find feces and perch upside down on the ceiling and you are .0000001 toward human intelligence.
People assume intelligent is encapsulated in a particular bit of cell structure called the brain or the neural net. This is reductionist crap that makes our techtopian dreams for immortality possible. But it is nonsence.
If anything we are holograms. Cut out a piece of the brain and intelligence somewhere else is still expressed. In the nerves of the spinal cord for instance. Watch a headless chicken run.
Build and program a fly to find feces and perch upside down on the ceiling and you are .0000001 toward human intelligence.
Sorry to be snarky here, but please, read a college science textbook or two before you inflict your opinions on anyone else. You'll be less embarrassed in the future.
The hologram thing was a cute idea in the 70s. The fact that memory is distributed in the brain, however, doesn't mean it's "holographic" or anything like it, any more than distributed files over a peer-to-peer net work mean that the network is holographic.
Headless chickens run because much of the subprocessing for movement is done in the spinal cord of a chicken, or a human, for that matter. It's efficiency, not magic.
In fact, much of the brain is highly specialized. Cut out the Werniche's area and Brocha's area of the brain and that person will never speak again. If the "mind" was a hologram, that wouldn't happen, some other area would take over. Same thing with spinal cord injuries. Perhaps you could refrain from spouting about holograms near a person in a wheelchair, or someone who's just lost vision and movement because of a stroke. They may be inclined to belt you.
As for "intelligence," whatever that is, it's been done already, in wetware. There's no physical reason it can't' be replicated in some other medium. It's an emergent property (just google it) of neural nets that become sufficiently large and complex.
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Re: Is A Terminator Scenario Possible?
by Carlhole » Tue 26 May 2009, 09:30:45
Despite 'Terminator,' machines still on our side: Scientists say AI will be humanity's 'Salvation'
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')ound a little too science fiction? Take a note of Kurzweil's track record: in the 1980s, he predicted a computer would beat a human grandmaster at chess by 1998. He was a year late, since Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997.
"This technology is growing exponentially," says Kurzweil. "What used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket. What used to fit in your pocket will fit inside a blood cell 25 years from now."
But rather than an adversarial war between man and machines envisioned in the "Terminator" series, Kurzweil believes the technical advancement of the next few decades will herald a literal rewiring of the human brain. Given the shrinking costs of nanotechnology, it's a matter of time before humans can turn themselves into supercomputers.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')ound a little too science fiction? Take a note of Kurzweil's track record: in the 1980s, he predicted a computer would beat a human grandmaster at chess by 1998. He was a year late, since Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997.
"This technology is growing exponentially," says Kurzweil. "What used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket. What used to fit in your pocket will fit inside a blood cell 25 years from now."
But rather than an adversarial war between man and machines envisioned in the "Terminator" series, Kurzweil believes the technical advancement of the next few decades will herald a literal rewiring of the human brain. Given the shrinking costs of nanotechnology, it's a matter of time before humans can turn themselves into supercomputers.
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