Skip to main content

Home/ GC_CSC350_SP08/ Group items tagged intelligence

Rss Feed Group items tagged

nagareochiru

Science Fiction Writer Robert J. Sawyer: Y3K: Artificial Intelligence - 0 views

  • Within a century, it will be possible to scan a human mind and reproduce it inside a machine. Regardless of whether our minds are just very sophisticated analog computers, or whether they have a quantum-mechanical element (as Roger Penrose proposes), we will nonetheless be able to duplicate them artificially.
  • Already, at the close of the second millennium, a transhumanist movement has begun; Christopher Dewdney is the principal Canadian spokesperson for it. This movement holds that uploading our consciousness into machines is desirable, since that will free us from biological aging and death. On the other hand (a decidedly biological metaphor), there is more to being human than just the networks of synapses in our brains; clearly, much of what we are is tied in intimately with our bodies. We may find that uploaded humans are not happy — indeed, are incapable of happiness or any emotion.
  • Just as laws today are moving toward recognizing a woman's right to control her body and any separate sentience that may be contained within it, so too will the laws of the future recognize the right of humans to upload their consciousness and then dispose of the original biological versions of themselves; such eliminations will not be seen as suicides or murders, but rather as a natural, perfectly legal step, eliminating a no-longer-needed biological container and preserving the uniqueness of the individual.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It may, in fact, be dangerous to build conscious machines that are more intelligent than we are; just as intelligence may be an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems, so too may ambition and desire be emergent properties of sufficiently intelligent systems.
  • Although we used to consider the mastery of chess to be the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, we've had to concede that it is simply a mathematical problem, and even today's primitive computers can do it better than the most skilled human. But there are other realms — including art, philosophy, and scientific theorizing — that, because of their intuitive, nonlinear nature, we may always be better at than any machine. Our AI servants may free humanity at the dawn of the fourth millennium to concentrate on these areas.
Danny Thorne

Neuromancer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Gibson explores artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and multinational corporations overpowering the traditional nation-state long before these ideas entered popular culture. The concept of cyberspace makes its first appearance, with Gibson inventing the word to describe "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions."
  • fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about? (269).
nagareochiru

Blade Runner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, was based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
  • It is one of the most literate science fiction films, both thematically enfolding the philosophy of religion and moral implications of the increasing human mastery of genetic engineering, within the context of classical Greek drama and its notions of hubris,[39] and draws on Biblical images, such as Noah's flood,[40] and literary sources, such as Frankenstein.[41]
  • Blade Runner delves into the future implications of technology on the environment and society by reaching into the past using literature, religious symbolism, classical dramatic themes and film noir. This tension between past, present and future is apparent in the retrofitted future of Blade Runner, which is high-tech and gleaming in places but elsewhere decayed and old.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A high level of paranoia is present throughout the film with the visual manifestation of corporate power, omnipresent police, probing lights, and in the power over the individual represented particularly by genetic programming of the replicants. Control over the environment is seen on a large scale, hand in hand with the seeming absence of any natural life, with artificial animals being created as a substitute for the extinct originals.
nagareochiru

Dune (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • He took a plane to Florence, Oregon, where the USDA was sponsoring a lengthy series of experiments in using poverty grasses to stabilize and slow down the damaging sand dunes, which could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways."[5] Herbert's article on the dunes, "They Stopped the Moving Sands," was never completed (and only published decades later in an incomplete form in The Road to Dune), but it sparked Herbert's interest in the general subject of ecology and related matters.
  • The CHOAM corporation is the major underpinning of the Imperial economy, with shares and directorships determining each House's income and financial leverage.
  • Melange is crucial as it enables space travel, which in turn is monopolized by the Spacing Guild; its Navigators use the spice to safely plot a course for the Guild's Heighliner ships via prescience using "foldspace" technology, which allows instantaneous travel to anywhere in the galaxy.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Dune responded in 1965 with its complex descriptions of Arrakis life, from giant sandworms (for whom water is deadly) to smaller, mouse-like life forms adapted to live with limited water. The inhabitants of the planet, the Fremen, must compromise with the ecosystem they live in—sacrificing some of their desire for a water-laden planet in order to preserve the sandworms which are so important to their culture. In this way, Dune foreshadowed the struggle the world would have following Carson's book in balancing human and animal life.
  • Environmentalists have pointed out that Dune's popularity as a novel depicting a planet as a complex—almost living—thing, in combination with the first images of earth from space during the same time period being published, was instrumental in environmental movements such as the creation of Earth Day in many nations worldwide.[11]
  • The Fremen also are more capable of self-sacrifice, putting the community before themselves in every instance, while the world outside wallows in personal comfort at the expense of others. In all these characteristics, Dune is not alone in drawing from Gibbon's work, as Isaac Asimov creates a similarly declining empire in his Foundation series, as does Arthur C. Clarke in his The City and the Stars.[12]
nagareochiru

JSTOR: Peabody Journal of Education: Vol. 62, No. 1, Toward the Advancement of Microcom... - 0 views

    • nagareochiru
       
      Robots as educators today? Tomorrow?
nagareochiru

JSTOR: Ethics: Vol. 84, No. 3, p. 248 - 0 views

    • nagareochiru
       
      Mechanical restrictions, rather than only philosophical hang-ups.
nagareochiru

JSTOR: English Journal: Vol. 79, No. 3, p. 39 - 0 views

    • nagareochiru
       
      Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN as the earliest (non-mythological, fantastic, mystic, etc.) example of man creating life via science.
1 - 7 of 7
Showing 20 items per page