Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

The Philosophy and Implications of Artificial Intelligence pt.2

Tristan McGuffin        Section 10                                                                         Installment 2


       
      Continuing from my last installment, I would like to present even more information covering the subject of artificial intelligence and how its possibilities are being explored.

        Massive amounts of information is being gathered every day for purposes of research and preservation. Whether it be the ads you see on your Facebook feed or those cute little quizzes you take on Buzzfeed whenever you're bored, it's becoming more and more commonplace to provide information to the internet. Every online comment you make or every click you've made on a screen has the potential to provide some sort of useful information to anyone interested. It's not so uncommon for a website or company to do just this, amalgamating all of the interactions they can record to create a kind of information archive. This is very useful in marketing and some tech powers, such as Google, have even begun making what could end up being early iterations of a kind of an all-encompassing internet hive mind.

       The idea of having one single source for all of the information I could ever imagine, and then some, is exciting to say the least. With a connection to an infinite source of information, nothing would be out your reach.

       This is the current model for how artificial intelligence is being developed and it's going to change the way we interact with each other forever. Robots are being programmed to learn exponentially from interaction and observation, mimicking the very way that human beings learn. They can be taught and they can teach- these are leaps and bounds in a direction that could very well bring us into The Singularity.

        Imagine a future where the separation between man and machine is blurry or even indistinguishable. This is the path we have set ourselves upon. At some point our technology is bound to evolve at exponential rates, taking us along with it and this fact is somewhat intimidating.  What if we lose our grasp on what it means to be an individual? How would this impact how we interact with the world around us? What would motivate us if we no longer had to deal with our biological stressors? These are questions that immediately come to mind, questions that may have one million answers or none.


        Death and sickness are terrible things that may no longer exist in the future, which at face value sounds wonderful, however I can't help but feel that with so much gain we may lose what truly makes us human.  Mankind may lose all of the control it's been desperately grasping for all of these millennia and that may just be exactly what we need.

        The way technology is going, there's no need to worry about becoming a robot any time soon and the human condition is another conversation for another time. Thank you so much for lending me your time and energy and don't forget put that human brain to use and do a little bit of hard thinking every once in a while.

Link to part 1

1 comment:

  1. A link to part 1 has been placed in the bottom of the post.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.