January 1, 2009

As if you didn't have enough to worry about...

A New Kind of Mind

When this emerging AI, or ai, arrives it won't even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its very ubiquity will hide it. We'll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, including scientific measurements and modeling, but because the smartness lives on thin bits of code spread across the globe in windowless boring warehouses, and it lacks a unified body, it will be faceless. You can reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online) and the coveted zip of fast alien digital memory, it will be difficult to pinpoint what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us? - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

Posted by Vanderleun at January 1, 2009 12:57 PM
Bookmark and Share

Comments:

HOME

"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

It's just not going to happen the way either that movie or that other blog think that it is going to.

Posted by: Eric Blair at January 1, 2009 7:59 PM

I couldn't agree more. Hubris setting itself up for nemesis.

Posted by: vanderleun at January 1, 2009 8:49 PM

This sounds a lot like "The Adolescence of P-1," a book I enjoyed growing up. A young hacker writes some code to break into computers, then forgets about it for a couple of years. The code continues evolving, becomes sentient and goes looking for its creator. A good read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adolescence_of_P-1

Posted by: Jonathan at January 16, 2009 6:06 PM