But these are just movies, right? Imagine my surprise when I opened up the article about Louis Del Monte, who has this to say: "Today there's no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the timeframe most experts predict. From that point on you're going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines." He wrote a book called "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Will Artificial Intelligence Serve Us Or Replace Us?" and it's got a lot of science in it, but he insists it's not science fiction. He points to studies that suggest that machines are already becoming self-aware, or at least capable of lying and being concerned with self-preservation. Del Monte says, "By the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species." If this all sounds a little like the work or Doctor Charles Forbin or Miles Dyson, feel free to go ahead and change the channel. For me? The future is now.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Future Shock
"In the not too distant future," those words have put a chill in my spine for about as long as I've been alive. Of course, that future has shifted over those years. The very idea that a movie would call itself "Frankenstein 1970" meant that there was a potential for a mad scientist to create life from his wicked and crazy experiments was a possibility. The fact that the movie was made in 1958 and I watched it the first time in 1968 didn't keep me from being frightened of that potential. Seven years later, I was convinced that it was only a short hop, skip and a roll before we would all adopt Rollerball as our planet's pastime. This was just a few years after I had to reckon with the notion that the progenitor of a race of super-intelligent apes had already arrived and the clock was ticking on the whole human race as the dominant species.
But these are just movies, right? Imagine my surprise when I opened up the article about Louis Del Monte, who has this to say: "Today there's no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the timeframe most experts predict. From that point on you're going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines." He wrote a book called "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Will Artificial Intelligence Serve Us Or Replace Us?" and it's got a lot of science in it, but he insists it's not science fiction. He points to studies that suggest that machines are already becoming self-aware, or at least capable of lying and being concerned with self-preservation. Del Monte says, "By the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species." If this all sounds a little like the work or Doctor Charles Forbin or Miles Dyson, feel free to go ahead and change the channel. For me? The future is now.
But these are just movies, right? Imagine my surprise when I opened up the article about Louis Del Monte, who has this to say: "Today there's no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the timeframe most experts predict. From that point on you're going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines." He wrote a book called "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Will Artificial Intelligence Serve Us Or Replace Us?" and it's got a lot of science in it, but he insists it's not science fiction. He points to studies that suggest that machines are already becoming self-aware, or at least capable of lying and being concerned with self-preservation. Del Monte says, "By the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species." If this all sounds a little like the work or Doctor Charles Forbin or Miles Dyson, feel free to go ahead and change the channel. For me? The future is now.
Seven years later, I was convinced that it was only a short hop, skip and a roll before we would all adopt Rollerball as our planet's pastime.
ReplyDeleteYou say this as if we didn't adopt Rollerball as the planet's pastime. It was right after jai alai supplanted baseball in America.