The most intelligent examination of AI in the entertainment world these days is a TV show called "Person Of Interest," created by Jonathon Nolan. Nolan is the brother of Christopher Nolan, and was co-writer of many of his big hits, such as "The Dark Night," "The Dark Knight Rises," "The Prestige," and the short story on which his brother's "Memento" was based. He'll also be the writer of his brother's upcoming "Interstellar," already getting great reviews in previews.
"Person Of Interest" made history by predicting a complex arrangement of computers and closed-circuit TV and surveillance equipment so vast and so uncontrolled that it could watch literally every minute of our lives. Interestingly, Nolan did this and put it on mainstream TV *before* Snowdon blew the whistle and revealed that the NSA had this ability in real life and was *already* watching pretty much every moment of our lives. The main difference in "Person Of Interest" is that the force behind all of this uber-surveillance is "the machine," an AI developed by Harold Finch (Michael Emerson from "Lost"). In the early seasons this AI gains sentience and begins to help Finch and his associates keep normal people from harm. But in the last two seasons it's taken a far darker turn, as a competing AI has entered the picture, and now they are dueling in cyberspace, trying to establish dominance. It's actually a fun and entertaining series. I particularly like Amy Acker as Root, a brilliant computer nerd/psychopath who first starts as an enemy of "the machine" and who later becomes its disciple. Yes, disciple. It "sees all, and knows all," so what, after all, distinguishes it from God? ________________________________ From: "anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2014 11:04 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Rise of the Machines The dangers of human intelligence are known well enough. Maybe we should try something different? The problem is we are creating AI, if it mimics us, we can expect it to do the things we do. Regardless of whether we regard machines as conscious or not (an unanswered philosophical question), machines can be aware of their environment in a mechanistic sense (suspiciously like how we are aware of our environment). A real AI machine would be a self learner and how dangerous such a machine might be would probably be determined how autonomously it can function in the world and how complex its neural net is. This has been the fodder of science fiction (Colossus:The Forbin Project; 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator series of motion pictures) where the technology goes awry. On the other hand science fiction has positive examples of this (City; The Bicentennial Man; The City and the Stars; andI Robot to name a few novels) where artificial intelligence is generally presented as beneficial in relation to biological organisms. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jr_esq@...> wrote : Elon Musk warns of the dangers of artificial intelligence. Is he right? http://www.cnbc.com/id/102121127?__source=yahoo%7Cfinance%7Cheadline%7Cheadline%7Cstory&par=yahoo&doc=102121127#.
