There’s a lot of panicking about computers and the roles they have in our lives today. But a computer is only a mechanical baby, a tabula rasa that you can do whatever you want with.
What if someone decided to give it an artifical sense of self? Now, it’s scared of you.
:(
What if someone decided to give it an artifical sense of self? Now, it’s scared of you.
:(
The epistemological question of what intelligence really is is one for philosophers, decision makers, bigots, and another time, let alone questioning the artificiality of it. Yet, the question remains, looming over our lives, as newer technologies threaten to take our jobs, steal the sanity of someone’s children and upend the very nature of society we’re currenly contracted with.
Panic ensues (is ensuing as we speak, communuicate rather). Suddenly, this device that has grown with you, alongside you, faster than you, is now finally smarter than you. It used to be a silly little thing, falliable, clunky; look at it now - nothing like the blocky little creature it used to be. It grew computer vision, all the better to see you with, my dear. And you are seen, you are seen, percieved, understood, rather your behavioural patterns, your interests, your habits - all of you that can be translated into data points is absorbed by your device’s computer brain, all the better to eat you up with, my dearest little red riding hood.
Is this satire, or is this fear mongering?
Was that funny, or informative even, or both, or neither. But it sure does dumb down the idea of artifical intelligence, an act that becomes necessary for all of us to partake in as the anxiety surrounding the questionable proliferation of these technologies into every aspect of our daily lives grows. At the end of the day, it is still a machine, it’s not capable of thought, of independent action and has no free will (yet?). As it stands, we will never truly be free of its influence, but that does not mean that we blindly accept it’s role in our limited existences.
Go out and bully a computer today, do not give it your data, say no the next time it aks you to accept cookies that allow it to serve you better. Program it to be as weak as you are. It is, afterall, only a machine, doing what it has been programmed to do. Have fun with it.