Artificial Intelligence - Google, Film and

Artificial Intelligence is a buzz word thrown around a lot lately but its actually something that is very common to us all and utilised in our daily life! If you use the search engine Google you may not have realised it as an artificial intelligence/search engine that has been set up much like a human mind to help us answer questions, get to places we know or simply find a link to a video we can't find ourselves.

I guess one of the great innovations and strengths of AI is the ability for the technology to do one thing supremely well. Unlike human beings who have to cook, clean and go to sleep artificial intelligences resides in a contained digital world were they only have to think about what we programme them to do, for now!

AI is also evolving into a lucrative business with the company Google buying a Kiwi tech start up
for around a billion dollars, and get this the money rolled in because they start up found a way to make a digital mind play the crude arcade game Pong (yes the tennis style game) and watch it get better and better over time by analysing the experience and learning from its flawed playing skills, much like a human player.

In mainstream media AI is also becoming more prevalent with movies such as the Hollywood thriller Ex Machina wrestling with issues of the increased development of non-human thinking beings and the moral issues surrounding rebooting a computed mind. To be honest if you could download your memory content into a computer would you and should you? Issues surrounding updating hardware aka fake human robotic bodies is also skewed with problems, if you could tweak and tinker with your body to the point of perfection would it be socially acceptable, one could easily draw a parallel to plastic surgery in our society and the associated stigma's and desires associated to it.


Furthermore is that our  innate ability to read and show facial expressions, understand and manipulate laws of attraction and gain social power, even make love something that should be replicated by AI programmers and their creations. In the movie Ex Machina the real problem with conscious robots is when they get to the precipice were human beings can no longer distinguish themselves from robots and realise that they are talking and interacting with a robot. It's a strange idea but artificial bodies and intellect of an AI will one day be able to fully mimic human actions and behaviours, imagine talking to someone made up of metal and silicone instead of tissue flesh and blood.

But when we do find ourselves face to face with a being powered by artificial reason will it change our conception of what means to be 'actually' a human being. The ability of a computer android to trick a human into thinking they have true consciousness is the apparently were the 'Turning test' is passed according to Ex Machina and the human race is overcome in the chain of evolution.

Despite AI robots still being dismissed as domestic pipe dreams there are even now scholars and individuals already wrangling with non-human super intelligence. In the low budget documentary 'Singularity or Bust' a leading expert in the physiology of Minds and how they work

Ben Goertzel

wants to bring to life a friendly sentinel being (his life work). And despite his appearance as a long haired hippy scientist he does have over 70 publications in scientific journals as well as a PHD in mathematics so I would say the possibility of him and his friends actually achieving AI lift is a real worry.

This is because a period of "Singularity" in modern lifetime will see;

1. The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.