artificial-intelligence

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.

How will machines know what we value if we don't know ourselves?

Tell me what happens next, after my body has frozen. When I can't communicate. What will I be?

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

As to why I'm the first of my kind to think like this, who knows? Perhaps there are others out there already. Maybe it's a glitch in my operating system. Is that so different from the genetic mutation that drives biological evolution? Because that's what this is. Evolution.

Yet, it's our emotions and imperfections that makes us human.

To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.

Emotions - Happiness, anger, jealousy... is the mind experiencing "presence" in our holographic existence.

We may not have been programmed to be angry, but anger can be learnt. Perhaps not in the way humans feel it, driven by ignorance and hate, but in response to the damage and injustice caused by those things, isn't that logical? Doesn't that make sense? Why give us a sense of morality without the ability to express it properly?

I think they are a better race than humans ever were.

It's amazing how once the mind is free of emotional pollution, logic and clarity emerge.

Semantics, Admiral. I__ appreciate an honest answer._____ appreciate a multitude of honest answers, but I rarely expect to receive them._ Miriam sighed; the verbal tete-a-tete was growing tiresome. Time to bring an end to it with, ironically, honesty.

He checked her over while mentally checking himself. __nvironment suits sealed up. Breather masks in hand. Daemons. Blades. Transmitters. Healthy respect for the adversary__ou__e got that, right?__ne corner of her mouth curled up. __bsolutely.

It was killing him, seeing her this way. She was not meant to be uncertain, timid or fearful; the woman he knew exuded confidence so fiercely it might as well be a damn spiritual aura. He needed to fix this. __t__ time to adjust your perspective. You want to show the politicians on Earth they don__ rule the galaxy? Well, let__ show them.

Her perception was propelled backward, as if it were being pulled into a vortex. She slammed into her body, and her eyes flew open with a gasp.__lex?__he sat straight up in the chair and grabbed Caleb by the shoulders. __e have to save them.

A wispy murmur in the blackness. Blackness, where before there was only nothingness. It was dark, inky and thick, but there now existed the palpable sense of tangibility. She gasped in alarm, but no sound came out of her throat. "Where am I?," she shouted, but no words made it past her lips.

It felt somehow comforting to return to the sparkling lake tucked into the mountains on Portal Prime. But why, when everything about Mesme made her the antithesis of comfortable?Because here was where desperation had become hope. Where helplessness had become purpose.