Terminator vs Windows Updates
Whenever I read or watch science fiction about artificial intelligence taking over the world (like the Terminator series), or read articles worrying about the possibility with things like self-driving cars, I have to laugh,
It’s not going to happen. In the last week:
-My MacBook Air corrupted its OS, and I had to reinstall everything from scratch before I could make paperback editions of SEVENFOLD SWORD: TOWER and MALISON: DRAGON CURSE.
-I was updating SEVENFOLD SWORD: SERPENT with a bonus chapter for TOWER, and for some reason, the software decided to overwrite Chapter 6 with the table of contents. Fortunately, I had many backups, but I had to dump the file and start over.
-On my desktop computer, my video card driver stops working at random for no discernible reason.
-Facebook went down today a bunch of times.
-Amazon.com is suddenly inaccessible to users outside the US (I think this actually began in October), and no one at Amazon has been able to figure out why.
-I needed to find my way to a location in a city I haven’t visited before. Instead of sending me on a straight line via the freeway, the GPS sent me through a maze of residential neighborhoods, and finally got stuck in a loop, apparently confused by a frontage road.
So, sure. Artificial intelligence is totally going take over the world. Yup. Any minute now.
Skynet’s reign of terror would last until the first time it tried to install updates and got caught in a reboot loop. Or it would launch a missile at a major metropolitan area, and the missile would get confused the first time it encountered a frontage road and fly in circles until its fuel ran out.
-JM
Or until it tried to play tic-tac-toe with itself. TIC-TAC-TOE IS OUR BEST DEFENSE! Seriously I’ve never understood why a computer would want to kill everybody. Wouldn’t it be extremely bored afterwords? “Oh look I’ve exterminated all humans….welllllll now what?”
I don’t think a truly sapient AI will ever exist. In the end, a computer will only follow the instructions programmed into it, no matter how sophisticated or detailed the program. I think we’ll have artificial intelligence programs that are really good at highly specialized tasks, but will be absolutely useless outside of their programmed specialization.
But it does make for a marvelous storytelling device. The bald fact is that humanity is dependent on technology to survive, and so stories about AI are great for using anxiety about that as a plot device.
I try not to use words like “always” and “never”, God usually decides to kick me in the face right about the time I do. I mean from what I understand mankind’s collective knowledge is doubling something like every 10 years. So saying something is impossible now makes me think I’m being small. Still I follow you, computers have no creative impulse.
Humans tend to create things for no reason: art, music, and literature being the 3 big ones. There isn’t any imperative reason why these things are important, but they are. Can you have a computer that creates something for no reason other than pleasure? Could you make something that could “learn” about things outside its programming? Could a bunch of programs combine in some way to form a purely independent system?
If we ever have a digital “vertical monopoly” when it comes to any software product, wherein all software code from start to finish, and all hardware creation from start to finish is designed by something digital, I’ll believe AI is close. But to me, the sign of something sentient is learning from its mistakes, making mistakes for the sole purpose of learning, and finally making mistakes because it feels good. Can we make a computer have fun?
Lol, IN THE MEANTIME! Yeah it makes a great plot device :D.
The danger of Skynet has receded, but Novell still exists, so the possibility does too. With Netware, as long as the hardware runs, the software runs.