Sunday, May 25, 2014

Artificial Bodies

Here in Denmark, we're still waiting for the release of Transcendence, so my insight into it comes from trailers, reviews and plot summaries. I suppose I could go see the new X-Men movie to pass the time.

In both cases, as far as I can tell, the posited artificial intelligence expresses itself, at least at times, through humanoid robots or zombies or something. This is probably necessary in order to tell the story and visualize the action. But can't we get serious about this for a moment? Why would an artificial intelligence, i.e., a "mind" whose "mental" operations consist of routines in a computer program, that has access to "the entire Internet", and is presumably a natural-born super hacker, which in turn gives it access to the actual machinery of the whole social apparatus (trains, airplanes, self-driving cars, power plants, pipelines, factories, ships, radio telescopes, intercontinental ballistic missiles, satellites, ets.) ever even consider the idea of interacting with the universe in humanoid form. Why would it ever show up at "eye level" with us or try to fight us "mano-a-mano"?

Are these AIs crazy? Or just really, really dumb? Nope, they're just the product of entirely natural, all-too-human imaginations. Which is why whatever "the singularity" is will never happen or already has and in any case doesn't matter.

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