Tuesday, 25 January 2011

Rage Against the Machine




I've been a human now for 22 years and its had its ups and downs. I know I'm a human because on numerous occasions I have been able to pass facebook's CAPTCHA test on most of these occasions. Online that seems to be the only way to check if the user is a bot or a human (bots cant read things that are not linear). Online we create our own identities, but so can chatterbots like Eliza who pretends to be a psychiatrist. She cannot sustain what we would consider intellengent conversation as the speed of the conversation is slow, and she cant follow the conversation when the topic changes drastically. Is she intellegent all the same?

Lets talk about intelligence and robots. What is intelligence? Ill be honest with you I’m not entirely sure as most of our intellegence tests are based on memory and logic puzzles. In that respect I would assume that machines are actually smarter than us as they have a much bigger memory and its organized a lot better. If we look at soft artificial intelligence like search engines it may seem that my assumption is correct. 

However you don't see Google turning out essay after essay on all the information it can find for you. Abstract and lateral thinking is at this moment is something machines and the software that powers them cannot apply when problem solving, but do we really need these machines to become more human like? Rodney Brookes believes that intellengence needs a body and to interact with the environment I would have to agree, but what about in cyberspace where we don't need bodies to interact with other people and things? In certain MUD's (multi user dimension) bots are created to act like human players.

Do we really want robots to be modeld on humans? Do we want them to have traits like we do, and interact in the same manner we do? Will it get to the point where they become self aware and develop thier own identities in the real world? I'm not sure if I will see such a development in my life time, but if it does happen at all it raises ever more questions about what will happen to us when they realize they are both smarter and stronger than us. Will they become our new gods? Us humans never really seem to know what we are getting ourselves into, so like the nuclear disasters we have created I really just have to hope this doesn't come back to bite us in the ass.





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