Google's role in the Singularity
Is Google trying to build the first conscious computer?
"they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test" - in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations.
George Dyson hints that there may be some evil intentions hidden behind Google's loving exterior:
"When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?"
For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:
"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."
Comments
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There is a line from a poem by Richard Braughtigan, who, for lack of a better descriptive, was a popular writer during the hippie era of the late 60s early 70s: "All watched over by machines of loving grace."
I even included the line in the title of a stock market newsletter I used to write.
I haven't finished Ray's book. Probably take weeks.
Ray brings up interesting issues. One is a human's relationship with technology, of course.
Since Ray gets around a lot, I can assume with 100% certainty he has engaged in debates, verbal and written, with high-powered theologians and other big deal church types espousing a manner of religious and spiritual persuasions.
And there are the seniors with no jobs who watch the TV church shows all day and drive the preacher at my church up the wall.
And they're the most consistent of voters.
And then there are U.S. politicians in Washington DC and state capitals, most of whom are lawyers, and they all want to get re-elected.
And these folks are going to pander directly to those political groups that will get them the most votes by espousing agendas that often times drive educated folks up the wall.
Interesting, to me, how seemingly secure people can experience such seeming insecurity, because, for example, someone might say, "In 10 years, information scientists will successfully reverse engineer the brain and construct an AI with a billion times the computing power of the human brain."
In a sense, one could say, "you're releasing a demon if you use an AI."
Perhaps one day, one will say, in a completely different sense, "you're releasing a demon if you don't use an AI."
Thought about one of the SF movies where all that was left were the machines thinking and doing..... O(^__^)O