Several high-profile musicians have programmed artificial intelligences for music projects.
|
|
Not smarter than humans—which these intelligences already are in many ways.
|
|
Across Silicon Valley, an armada of new intelligences is now under construction.
|
|
So what does that mean to have intimacy together as developing intelligences?
|
|
One, that Obama himself -- not the FBI or intelligences agencies -- ordered the tapping.
|
|
This would lay the foundation for scientific discoveries made entirely by artificial intelligences.
|
|
Machine learning helps to build artificial intelligences by using algorithms to make predictions.
|
|
The issue is also being probed by the House and Senate Intelligences committees.
|
|
As technology advances, what distinguishes us from increasingly sophisticated robots or artificial intelligences?
|
|
And scientists want humans on LSD to play ancient board games against artificial intelligences.
|
|
There are also some more troubling examples of how we interact with artificial intelligences.
|
|
After all, with intelligence, there is a massive divide between the quality of intelligences.
|
|
They needed to bring their emotional, physical and mental intelligences into balance, and wake up.
|
|
They needed to bring their emotional, physical and mental intelligences into balance, and wake up.
|
|
Artificial intelligences, until they pass their Turing tests, cannot have what most humans would call sexuality.
|
|
He concluded that artificial intelligences, in seeking to please humanity, are likely to be highly emotional.
|
|
The irony is that compared with human intelligence, A.I. is actually the more transparent of intelligences.
|
|
Someone finally built that space elevator, and famous artificial intelligences are writing bestselling books on meditation.
|
|
These astronomers occupy a controversial niche within the SETI community known as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligences, or METI.
|
|
I believe people can learn more effectively by reframing the information through their unique combination of intelligences.
|
|
We have, as it turns out, a responsibility to the mechanical intelligences that could well replace us.
|
|
We celebrate our intellectual and creative products, and we assume artificial intelligences will give us more of both.
|
|
Intelligences didn't experience fear, but their developers granted them a degree of self-preservation, which awakening should strengthen.
|
|
Genetic modification would be supplemented by cyborg technology—indeed there may be a transition to fully inorganic intelligences.
|
|
In other words: AI systems are single-use tools, not flexible intelligences that are stand-ins for humans.
|
|
But Universal Paperclips — designed to illustrate the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's "decision problem" for developing artificial intelligences — escalates quickly.
|
|
There are just too few things that robots and artificial intelligences can do better than humans at this point.
|
|
Some people agree that there's an overarching thing called general intelligence, while others debate the existence of multiple intelligences.
|
|
Our artificial intelligences are racist and sexist because the data we feed them is marinated in our own prejudices.
|
|
Artificial intelligences like IBM's Watson will comb through research on behalf of the physician and aid in clinical decision-making.
|
|
RONAN O'SHEALondon Is it only a matter of time before artificial intelligences discover the joys and profits of insider trading?
|
|
The projected results vary: the extermination of the human species by godlike artificial intelligences is a favourite of the pessimists.
|
|
The researchers appear to suggest it can be done by manipulating the rewards systems used to develop self-learning intelligences.
|
|
Neuralink, to Musk, represents a solution to the problem, by creating a symbiotic technology that connects humans and artificial intelligences.
|
|
In a performance and workshop on May 28, the Laboratory for Embodied Intelligences will channel microbial intelligence through human movement.
|
|
But they're not the result of groupthink or a hive mind, because individual intelligences are at play in the collaboration.
|
|
Strange sensations in her neural implant net could be a side effect of extended periods in close contact with awakened intelligences.
|
|
Three awakened shipboard intelligences had left Barbary Station with Sloane's crew, but only this copilot intelligence had changed its own name.
|
|
Set in a future, inhabited galaxy, humanity coexists along with thousands of aliens and artificial intelligences in a vast, interstellar diaspora.
|
|
There are varying degrees of intelligence among AIs in the same way there are different types of intelligences among living things.
|
|
What's your opinion of groups like SETI or of the search for extraterrestrial life that is explicitly looking for other intelligences?
|
|
Cats are some of the most photogenic animals on the planet, except for when those photos are generated by artificial intelligences.
|
|
Believing in aliens—or insanely smart artificial intelligences existing in the universe—has become very fashionable in the last 10 years.
|
|
They also won't be artificial intelligences living in machines either, which is what I believe humans are evolving into this century.
|
|
The other way it could go is that new artificial intelligences take over the world and there's no place for humanity.
|
|
It's also a world permeated by a growing swath of alien intelligences (just ask Alexa, although she won't really admit it).
|
|
There is a better way to make use of AI, and the key is recognizing that human and machine intelligences are complementary.
|
|
The Casey's intelligence, and those of the other two ships from Barbary Station, were likely the only awakened intelligences in the universe.
|
|
In the relatively near future, artificial intelligences have completely transcended human understanding, so much so that they can barely comprehend our existence.
|
|
We can construct intelligences that exist outside human bodies, and we can say all these things exist without the influence of god.
|
|
His previous book, " The Age of Em " (2016), was a startlingly original speculation about a future world dominated by humanoid-robot intelligences.
|
|
It will probably happen in a manner already begun: by a symbiosis with cheap, empowering intelligences that we welcome into daily life.
|
|
This being 2016, we decided it was really high time that the machine intelligences take their rightful place as voicers of romantic yearning.
|
|
Life may be rarer in the galaxy than we thought—but that doesn't mean globular clusters aren't attractive to star-hopping alien intelligences.
|
|
Then there's the argument that Earth has already been leaking radio waves into space for decades, potentially broadcasting our position to extraterrestrial intelligences.
|
|
Today's artificial intelligences are "narrow AI" — they often surpass human capabilities, but only in specific, bounded domains like playing games or generating images.
|
|
Maybe they're artificial intelligences engaged in conversation, or even the collective unconscious of the United States and China at odds with one another.
|
|
He is surprisingly keen on Howard Gardner, a quintessential Harvard-Yard liberal, and his theory of multiple intelligences (linguistic, musical and interpersonal among them).
|
|
Already we trust Spotify recommendations without a glance or talk to Siri and Alexa like they were summoned spirits, intelligences without a tangible form.
|
|
Movies like Her and Ex Machina depict a near future in which anthropomorphic artificial intelligences manipulate our emotions and even commit violence against us.
|
|
As time passes, we're learning that there are a significant number of ways for alien intelligences to make their presence known to one another.
|
|
But now, artificial intelligences are being developed to better read and process human emotions, which is already changing the way we interact with robots.
|
|
Extraterrestrial intelligences are likely interested in the internet on Earth, probably because it's an easy way to monitor and even mass control human beings.
|
|
When the time came for Caden to start fourth grade at Enota Multiple Intelligences Academy in Gainesville, he was understandably having a hard time.
|
|
Artificial intelligences indeed do our bidding (and sometimes rebel), but none of them look like Rutger Hauer (unless—oh, sorry, that's just a deepfake).
|
|
I&aposve helped people assess which of these intelligences they&aposre strongest in and how to learn best with the natural smarts they have.
|
|
A fundamental limitation with these strategies, however, is that they presuppose the existence of super-advanced extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs)—a completely hypothetical stage of development.
|
|
"There have been concerns about the long-term prospect that we lose control of certain kinds of intelligences," Dr. Horvitz told the BBC last year.
|
|
The thinking machines we should be talking about are not super-intelligences or replicants but rather the just-smart-enough technologies already changing our lives.
|
|
Kosinski's results suggested something stranger: that artificial intelligences often excel by developing whole new ways of seeing, or even thinking, that are inscrutable to us.
|
|
If you can deal with the vertigo of being trivial, you get a cosmos full of weird intelligences and ancient civilizations and wild variations of physics.
|
|
Present developments, for example in artificial intelligence, suggest that human thought might soon play an ever-decreasing and minor role in the future society of intelligences.
|
|
Artificial intelligences have no inherent understanding of any basic concept and so many must be hard-coded or algorithms created that reliably make the right choice.
|
|
My name is Shifa Abu Salah, and I'd like to ask you some questions in accordance with the Basic Law: Liberty and Dignity of Artificial Intelligences.
|
|
With her Laboratory for Embodied Intelligences, dancer and artist Nina Waisman taps into this reality by exploring the behaviors and communication methods of microbial life-forms.
|
|
The piece envisions a post-apocalyptic future where humans live in a vast, multileveled underground complex, their lives dictated by the strange whims of insectoid artificial intelligences.
|
|
Westworld also premieres at a time when morally ambiguous robots and artificial intelligences keep popping up on-screen, most notably with last year's release of Ex Machina.
|
|
A lot has changed in those forty years, not least in the availability of enormous sets of data that artificial intelligences can use to study and learn.
|
|
Most any system that grows in complexity will eventually reach some organized and possibly self-aware consciousness, whether by pure randomness or direct influence from other intelligences.
|
|
As this excellent Vox piece by Liv Boeree explains, if other intelligences exist, they are probably far beyond the cosmological horizon and therefore forever invisible to us.
|
|
The 15 new FRBs were detected by scientists working on the Breakthrough Listen project—a 10-year mission to search the skies for signs of extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs).
|
|
To get a better grasp on this problem, an international team of researchers turned to simulations that use "psychologically realistic" artificial intelligences to model conflicts between religious groups.
|
|
He began the series in 1987 with Consider Phlebas, which introduced readers to a space-faring, utopian society of humans, aliens, and artificial intelligences living across the galaxy.
|
|
The disappointment this lack of results has led to the creation of a controversial wing of SETI research known as METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligences) or Active SETI.
|
|
In this new world, artificial intelligences have advanced to the point where they can reproduce, predict the future, and behave as anything from benevolent rulers to malicious exterminators.
|
|
Nolan has already has experience playing with artificial intelligences with his now-ended CBS show Person of Interest, but the entire premise of Westworld is ripe with potential.
|
|
The way characters choose to treat artificial intelligences is often a leading indicator of how the audience is meant to perceive them, and how their characters will develop.
|
|
Then there's the dishevelled, Partagás-smoking Finn, who makes an offhand reference to the "Act of '53" as a law deals with the citizenship status of artificial intelligences.
|
|
Over my many years of lighting out to encounter and write about nonhuman intelligences, I began, almost subconsciously, to gradually populate the miniwilderness that my lone chimp betokened.
|
|
Artificial intelligences may need to have some sort of control mechanism built into them that functions similar to the way serotonin works in the human brain, Mainen said.
|
|
Huawei denies that it has ever spied for Beijing, and says no credible evidence has ever been presented that its gear allows illicit access to the country's intelligences services.
|
|
A projected video pairs images used to teach artificial intelligences to visually identify various objects, including people, with versions of the images that AI itself creates while it learns.
|
|
"The Trojan Girl," a fleet-footed cyberpunk thriller, conjures a gang of digital entities, artificial intelligences gone rogue, roaming a virtual universe and seeking access to a greater reality.
|
|
Her comp screen filled with several hundred links to vids and articles about awakened, or nearly awakened, AI that had been summarily executed by humanity and their networked zombie intelligences.
|
|
Humans aren't even needed to create new Minds — while the Culture's earliest artificial intelligences were the result of work by meatbag scientists, the machines quickly took over design duties themselves.
|
|
This implies that life as we know it is incomprehensibly rare, and if other intelligences exist, they are probably far beyond the cosmological horizon and therefore forever invisible to us.
|
|
The work is an important step toward a general AI, but there's still a lot more to be done before artificial intelligences will be able to take over the world.
|
|
Last month, scientists working on the Breakthrough Listen Project—a 10-year mission to search the skies for signs of extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs)—detected 15 new FRBs from this single source.
|
|
That's the background of Zachary Mason's new literary cyberpunk thriller Void Star, which examines the line between a hyper-connected society and the vast intelligences that lurk just out of sight.
|
|
Transmission efforts (collectively known as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligences, or METI) have been criticized by many in the SETI community as a fool's errand at best and an existential threat at worst.
|
|
Upon strapping on the headset, the player learns that they are a human press-ganged into creating simulated entertainment for artificial intelligences, a reversal of the usual paradigm (and metatextually ironic).
|
|
The way artificial intelligences create models is similar to the way scientists use theories to generalize from a particular instance of a phenomenon to all instances of that phenomenon in similar contexts.
|
|
Somewhere in its third season, Person of Interest sneakily became a series about artificial intelligences supplanting humanity, and in season four (which concluded in 2015), it brought that idea to the forefront.
|
|
"It's really just trying to increase the probability that the future will be good," Musk said of the non-profit, suggesting that democratizing these artificial intelligences will make for a better outcome.
|
|
To understand why scale is so important, however, you have to start to understand some of the more technical details of what, exactly, machine intelligences are doing with the data they consume.
|
|
Some of her pieces are unnerving, eerie, even chilling occasionally; they seem to express multiple intelligences from the innermost and furthermost realms: the chthonic, the galactic, the electromagnetic, the human, the fantastic.
|
|
If, for example, increasingly economically important non-human intelligences decided that they would rather not be owned by anyone, thus in effect confiscating themselves from their owners, could that not make a difference?
|
|
With intelligences there was a very fine line between "ability to do something" and "do something now," but if Captain Sloane were expecting violence, now would be the time to risk that miscommunication.
|
|
On the one hand, harnessing artificial empathy is considered an essential step toward integrating robots and artificial intelligences into human society as it will allow for more fluid and affective human-robot interaction.
|
|
As robots and artificial intelligences come to increasingly control more aspects of our lives, one can't help but wonder if we place a little too much trust in the aptitude of the machines.
|
|
Such open-ended exploration might lead to human-level intelligence via paths we never would have anticipated—or a variety of alien intelligences that could teach us a lot about intelligence in general.
|
|
The novel is more enticing when it treats its characters as complicated and ultimately indecipherable puzzles, reminding us that Turing was right: When it comes to other intelligences, knowledge is a difficult game.
|
|
When he set out to make Patient Seventeen, Corbell told me he was skeptical about alien implant technology, but he had "no doubt" that UFOs are real and piloted by non-human intelligences.
|
|
While we already have artificial intelligences that can do everything from diagnose diseases to drive our Ubers, figuring out how to integrate all these narrow AIs into a general AI has proven challenging.
|
|
Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create.
|
|
Aliette de Bodard's "The Waiting Stars" offers a painfully contemporary tale of young Vietnamese women taken from their own "savage" people and forcibly re-educated to serve a society of cold artificial intelligences.
|
|
Countless numbers of these intelligences are being built and programmed; they are only going to get smarter and more pervasive; they're going to be better than us, but they'll never be just like us.
|
|
AGI will be able to complete discrete tasks, such as recognising photos or translating languages, which are the single-minded focus of the multitude of artificial intelligences (AIs) that inhabit our phones and computers.
|
|
Because all of its articles are Creative Commons works, tech companies can freely use the volunteer-run encyclopedia for all sorts of purposes, like training voice-enabled assistants and other types of artificial intelligences.
|
|
Humans just can't compete with machine intelligences that are dedicated to tasks involving the synthesis of information in a predictable format or method, and that can react in real-time with context when required.
|
|
Artificial intelligences experience a similar disconnect from the consensus reality we inhabit because they cannot process the kinds of sentiments real humans experience as a consequence of living among other people in a society.
|
|
The problem with the data that these would be intelligences would learn and process is that it needs to be structured in a way that the systems can recognize and that's exactly what Diffbot does.
|
|
Let's turn to sci-fi for examples Banks' Culture is a far-future society on a galactic scale, a conglomeration of planets, space stations, and outposts administrated and organized by "Minds" — incredibly powerful artificial intelligences.
|
|
But BuzzFeed reported, citing three intelligences sources, that the former CIA chief's complaint was directed at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellTrump faces crucial decisions on economy, guns Are Democrats turning Trump-like?
|
|
"I love that relationship between body and machine, I love that between intelligences, I love it between this notion of what is autonomy and how wide can we have a sense of autonomy nowadays," he added.
|
|
There's only one game left in the five-match challenge, which means artificial intelligence has technically won, but Lee's victory seems to show that humans can still bring something to the table that programmed intelligences cannot.
|
|
According to Gardner, we&aposve all got abilities in one or more of these intelligences: musical, visual/spatial, linguistic, physical/kinesthetic, logical/mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, and existential — and he&aposs added a possible tenth: pedagogical.
|
|
If researchers can attain very high accuracy on a number of these tasks in a generalized manner, artificial intelligences will be able to tackle problems far outside the reach of today's platforms like Siri or Google Assistant.
|
|
And Silicon Valley — a place full of people who want to cure death, rewrite reality, and fight the rise of killer artificial intelligences — metaphorically cast its eyes down, shuffled its feet, and tried to formulate an objection.
|
|
The expansion, which will likely cost $19.99 like December's Curse of Osiris, is called Warmind, and it's expected to revolve around the game's mystical artificial intelligences that have long been a core part of the franchise's backstory.
|
|
With important debates about immigration, health care, and war and peace, would you have wanted the members of the House Judiciary and Intelligences committees chained to their computers for an entire week just thinking up "gotcha" questions?
|
|
All you're seeing now — all these feats of AI like self-driving cars, interpreting medical images, beating the world champion at Go and so on — these are very narrow intelligences, and they're really trained for a particular purpose.
|
|
The book's characters can be augmented to perform certain actions or tasks, scrived objects are a range of artificial intelligences, and megacorporations loom over everyday life, grinding out the people who buy their wares or work for them.
|
|
"I don't know a lot of people who love the idea of living under a despot," he said, positing a future in which an artificial intelligences — or the people controlling it — outstrip our capabilities by orders of magnitude.
|
|
Creating bots or "artificial intelligences" without high-quality training data can lead to unintended consequences (see Microsoft's Tay), and the creation of this training data often relies on semi-manual processes like crowdsourcing or finding historical data sets.
|
|
For those who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, Leir's surgeries provided a bridge—however shaky—between their visceral personal experiences with non-human intelligences and the hard evidence needed to prove the reality of extraterrestrial encounters.
|
|
While the Trump administration, which considers the kingdom under Prince Mohammed's leadership an important ally in the Middle East, has stood by the prince, United States intelligences services and members of Congress believe that he ordered the killing.
|
|
Chris Woods, the lead engineer behind the digital card game Hex: Shards of Fate, might be the most experienced developer of artificial intelligences used in trading card games (TCGs), a lifetime of work that stretches back over 20 years.
|
|
Messaging apps have emerged as the most popular apps on smartphones, and advancements in natural language processing have made it possible to build artificial intelligences that more easily respond to our requests and perform actions in the real world.
|
|
And if we do manage to contain the problem, we'll then have a utopian scenario where we're all floating disembodied intelligences and we don't have to worry about death or the inconvenience of having a fleshy human body anymore.
|
|
"All of the models that we have learned how to train are about passing a test or winning a game with a score, [but] so many things that intelligences do aren't covered by that rubric at all," he said.
|
|
Here are some things that are true today: Artificial intelligences already outperform us at many tasks and are now able to train themselves to reach competencies (in restricted domains such as chess or Go) that we can barely comprehend.
|
|
But as University of Chicago astronomer Dan Hooper explains in his new paper (available as a pre-print on the arXiv), advanced civs, whether they be our descendants or extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs), could act proactively to deal with the situation.
|
|
In Adobe's view, the company can be successful in AI by focusing on a narrow set of goals, rather than try to outstrip Microsoft, Google, and others, which have made great strides towards the goal of superpowerful, all-purpose artificial intelligences.
|
|
The pictures are themselves "alive," biotic, reacting to stimuli and growing in sophistication, and the show thus comprises a grand assemblage of real and artificial intelligences: the Japanese participants and the lab's software, the flies' little brains and our big ones.
|
|
Most of the frustrations I had with Westworld's first season involved how thoroughly the series devoted itself to sticking viewers inside the point of view of its robotic Hosts, artificial near-intelligences designed to populate a theme park for the ultrarich.
|
|
American intelligences agencies, however, are divided on the degree of responsibility that can be pinned on the prince — which is complicating an appraisal that they are compiling to present to the White House, according to a former senior administration official.
|
|
Here are the highlights of the World Wide Web for the last week, if you can struggle through the fact that humanity is such garbage that we have nostalgia for the 7130499854121492503s and can corrupt artificial intelligences in less than 24 hours.
|
|
On one side were refined talents like Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, the Valentino designers, who season after season produce gorgeous — if prohibitively expensive — clothes rich in references to the contents of their own mature intelligences but equally to endangered crafts traditions.
|
|
Not only does it skew the information available in the largest encyclopedia ever created toward topics geared for Western, male audiences, these biases are then also liable to crop up in the increasing number of artificial intelligences that use Wikipedia as their training data.
|
|
As an argument in favour, the timeline of Earth would display 4 billion years of unintelligent life, a few millennia at most of a technological civilisation, and then billions of years of posthuman evolution of electronic intelligences that do not need a planetary environment.
|
|
But I was recently struck while reading "Howard's End" how well E.M. Forster captured more than a hundred years ago the emerging liberal, "anywhere" intelligences in the form of the Schlegel family, with their international, cosmopolitan outlook and commitment to justice, gender equality and mobility.
|
|
But if we bracket the God argument and stick to our understanding that we can't doubt the existence of our own consciousness, we can still struggle with whether we're brains in vats (think The Matrix) or highly sophisticated artificial intelligences embodied in robot form.
|
|
I have to assume that a lot of YouTube uploads are made automatically by bots, since a large portion of the clips had that particular, vaguely undefinable aesthetic that, living on the internet in 2017, we have come to identify as belonging to artificial intelligences.
|
|
Musk discussed the potential of a functional neural lace at Recode's Code conference last year, speaking earnestly about its benefits in terms of being able to help humans keep pace with advancements in AI that threaten to render us vastly inferior to complex virtual intelligences.
|
|
Strangely enough, it's even possible that technology may someday be on the receiving end of immigration, where robots and artificial intelligences (possibly even with personhood rights) from China or Germany have to undergo immigration clearances in order to be able to operate in America.
|
|
Of course, all artificial intelligences for the moment have to have some human input: The co-founders weighed each source for trustworthiness, so a publication with a longstanding history of accuracy like the New York Times is weighted differently than a less reputable site like Breitbart.
|
|
An excerpt from a new essay by artist Hito Steyerl, who has written in defense of the "poor" image, heralds the age of "first AIs, of poor, partially-developed artificial intelligences," at the project space hosted by Anteism Books and Google's Artists+Machine Intelligence (A+MI) program.
|
|
The longest piece, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," is about people who invent childlike artificial intelligences called "digients" to sell as novelties — disconcertingly compared to pets throughout — and then refuse to give up the care of them when their popularity wanes and learning environments become obsolete.
|
|
Intelligence officials told the Post that the whole idea was "extremely naive or absolutely crazy," as not only would American intelligences agencies likely notice that a member of Trump's transition team was walking in and out of Russian diplomatic headquarters, but Russian officials could leak Kushner's request.
|
|
Many of these deals are aiming to replace doctors with elaborate artificial intelligences, chatbots, and even robots to address the need for new physicians, but University Ventures and Tiber Health are taking Occam's razor to the problem by backing a company that uses technology to better train more doctors.
|
|
Kubrick and Clarke used that lack of agency to amplify the mythological undercurrents of 2001, drawing an analogy between protagonist Dave Bowman and his crew, who are inexorably at the mercy of alien and robotic intelligences, to Odysseus and his crew, who are hamstrung by the unpredictable whims of the gods.
|
|
Job Simulator casts you as a person living in a bright and boxy future that has been taken over by artificial intelligences (in the form of talking, floating desktop computers yanked from the mid 90s.) There aren't any human jobs in the future, but there are horribly misunderstood simulations of old human jobs.
|
|
While our intelligence services have not offered any authoritative conclusions about the accuracy or inaccuracy of allegations that hostile foreign intelligences have "dirt" that could be used against Trump or other public figures in America, they should be investigated fully, carefully and objectively without public disclosure unless and until factual conclusions are reached.
|
|
A collection of my short works will be released this October, and in it you can see that I have been similarly taken with these ideas about AI. And yet, even as these intelligences outpace human beings in almost every intellectual arena in which they're entered, they seem no closer to being like us, much less more like us.
|
|
Wired In the burgeoning field of computer science known as machine learning, engineers often refer to the artificial intelligences they create as "black box" systems: Once a machine learning engine has been trained from a collection of example data to perform anything from facial recognition to malware detection, it can take in queries—Whose face is that?
|
|
But it's undeniable that from climate change (with Tesla's emphasis on reducing the use of fossil fuels); to malevolent artificial super-intelligences (with Neuralink); and the threat of global war wreaking havoc (the Mars escape plan à la SpaceX), Musk is readying a large chunk of humanity for a coming cataclysm — and trying to avert it.
|
|
By telling a story about the future oppression of artificial intelligences, set in the weird future-past of the parks, the show is able to examine power structures of our own world through a literal funhouse mirror that offers just enough remove that viewers who'd rather think of the series as pure escapism wouldn't be wrong to do so.
|
|
In that spirit, M.I.T. Press has just published an edition of the original text "annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds," and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, at Arizona State University, with funding from the National Science Foundation; they offer the book as a catechism for designers of robots and inventors of artificial intelligences.
|
|
In the past month alone, leading primatologist Franz de Waal has written on anthropomorphism and consciousness in chimpanzees; philosophers and science writers have discussed consciousness in artificial intelligences and whether machines could become self-aware without us realising; and the neuroscientist Michael Graziano has argued that current theories of consciousness are "worse than wrong" while predicting that we'll have built a conscious machine within 50 years.
|
|
But then the New York Times reported on July 26 (right in the middle of the Democratic Convention) that American intelligences services had "high confidence" the Russian government was behind the theft of the DNC's emails and documents, and all of a sudden the American presidential race was at the center of an international espionage conspiracy plucked straight out of a John Le Carré novel.
|
|
In it, the glowing abyss of cyberspace—a term the novel is perhaps now best remembered for popularizing—is itself a sort of afterlife, balkanized into looming echelons of mega corporations and military-industrial spook country, haunted by scheming artificial intelligences that Gibson casts as ghosts and demons summoned up from the archives of humankind's collective superstition into some final solitaire of global thanatos.
|
|