Feb
17
2029: Judgment Day?
Filed Under Uncategorized
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7248875.stm
So I was surfing on Digg.com as I usually do when I have free time, and an article with a highly relevant title to New Media studies immediately caught my eye. The title was: “Machines ‘to match man by 2029.” Initially, I thought that the article was most likely a undergraduate writer blogging about robots and rambling without contributing a rational thought (sound familiar?). However, after I clicked on the link on Digg, I was directed to BBC News. I was shocked to see a reputable news outlet like BBC posting a story that sounds more like a fool’s dream. According to the US National Academy of Engineering, which is made up of eighteen technology experts (including Google’s Larry Page), we will be able to create artificial intelligence “with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029.”
That is mind blowing for me. Never had I even imagined in my wildest dreams that technology that sophisticated could emerge in such a short period of time (i.e. in my lifetime). However, the article also paints a bit of a different kind of picture of what artificial intelligence will be like than the one we’re used to seeing in movies (Terminator 2, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc.). Typically, when we think of artificially intelligent beings, we think of separate entities. The BBC article, on the other hand, imagines miniscule robots living inside us as mutual parasites. For a moment, I began wandering what Licklider would have thought about such an idea. After all, he believes that man and machine should be able to coexist by virtue of simple interaction between user and computer, but did he ever in his wildest dreams expect man and computer symbiosis, as he called it, in the literal sense?
These artificial intelligent entities which could be as small as a grain of rice could supposedly cure diseases and make us smarter by attaching themselves to our brains. In contrast to Engelbart’s ideas about thinking differently and outside our means to become smarter, the process of thought would be defeated if robots attached to our brains and fed us what we needed to know and did all the work for us. Do we want that though? I won’t argue that it wouldn’t be nice to effortlessly pass every test I take throughout my educational career, but if everyone could do that, then what would even be the point of testing? And who remembers what Dr. Campbell said about programs? “There is no perfect program.” Does anyone want our robots that we depend on and that maintain our super high tech thought processes to be imperfect? I don’t.
On a similar note:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ClxR-8VLxD8 (start at 1:49)
New Media is great and has vastly helped us become the progressive and technologically advanced society that we’ve become that can effortlessly share information with anyone around the world, but can we just keep New Media separate from our bodies, please?