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.

Google and Facebook may be our best defenders against Big Brother - Doubt It

John Hurt as Winston Smith in the movie Nineteen Eighty-Four. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

Link to Original Article: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/10/google-facebook-big-brother-reforms-data?commentpage=1

My Personal Reply:

Boo-Who Google don't have a monopoly on one Particular in the World
Although I don't want to be a cynic, as a young person I detest all companies either multi-national or the facade of modern government being allowed to surveil the public. In the common law there is such a thing as "the reasonable person". The civic figure (apparently the past tense is more relevant) was a person that symbolised the general views and opinion of society. And although I am not a great fan of society, I believe "the reasonable person" should not be monitored like a vanguard criminal. Perhaps a pertinent metaphor for everyone engaging in computer activities in the present tense is not unlike a bank robber. At least thats how I feel with a compute mouse in my hand I mean a stick of dynamite wired to the mainframe of the morons door running the world. At any rate I'm a deeply sceptical of the moral motivations of Google and Facebook. No doubt being denied a monopoly over their own "fibre optics" has been a truly new sensation to them. I'm glad those corporate capitalist monstrosities are suffering and not just the people around the world. Moss Bioletti Auckland, New Zealand

Jemima Kiss

Over a few weeks' worth of bedtimes in the summer of 1984, my dad read me Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Though the dystopian context would have been lost on nine-year old me, the pervasive malevolence and the futility of the struggle was not.

References to Orwell are never far off today, whether to Big Brother and the surveillance society, or doublethink and Room 101. The Orwellian dystopia is so familiar now to us – and so astonishingly real – that we might need a new cultural reference, a new literary vision to warn of what lies ahead.

It's the relentless creep of progress and development that inevitably makes our worst nightmares and most brilliant visions a reality. Fifty years ago, security expert Eugene Kaspersky told a conference last week, the public would have been protesting on the streets at the idea that cameras would be surveilling every public placeacross the country, all day, every day. Today, we just accept it.

At the same conference, Dublin's Web Summit, the vast audience in the hangar-sized hall was asked how many had abandoned consumer web companies in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations. Three people put up their hands – and this among well-informed, technologically confident people.

The gap between the shock of these revelations and the call to action is perverse. The story is huge, multifaceted and complex, which excludes all but the most committed. For others, the truth about services on which they are utterly dependent – we are all utterly dependent – is too inconvenient to want to act; far easier to declare, "I'm not doing anything wrong," and, "I don't care if I'm being watched."

In truth, the call to action is not that we consumers abandon our online lives and seek out anonymity tools such as Tor, or start encrypting all our email using PGP. It's no bad thing that more sophisticated security techniques are seeping into the mainstream consciousness; gleeful pub conversations about our how mobile phones double as microphones and how even the subtle differences in the sound of typewriter keys can be decoded. Kaspersky has his own currency of expertise to maintain, and he too recounts how he won't store any compromising data on a computer at all.

This is borne out by the testimony of the tech investors at Web Summit too. "We're just not looking for privacy-aware services," said Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures. "There are so many compelling examples of value being created by sharing data, from traffic jams to healthcare. The problem isn't privacy but trust. We can't retreat into the dark ages." That means spending time influencing policy, he concluded. Entrepreneurs were falling over themselves to testify to their fierce protection of customer data; taxi-app Hailo is building up records of payment details combined with location data for account holders, whileEvernote records increasingly extensive personal notes covering everything from bank statements to work meetings. Both say they have not handed over customer data outside of specific warrants but as we now know, the NSA doesn't need permission – it will help itself. What are you sharing online?

The crisis is in public trust of both our governments – who, when it suits them, will seize the opportunity to criticise oppressive regimes who restrict free speech — and corporations whose reputation depends on credibility and trust. European nations have generally set up rigorous laws to protect their citizens from business, while its governments rely on the trust and goodwill of the public. In the US that situation is reversed, with citizens protected from government through the constitution, and business commercially dependent on trust, among other things. The lack of oversight and accountability has meant the security services never had to draw the line about what is acceptable, necessary, moral and legal.

This dynamic of corporate autonomy may end up creating the strongest fightback against the over-reaching security services, with Google and Yahoo's fury at the intercepts of their data networks and heavy lobbying in Washington. "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fibre networks," said Google's chief legal officer David Drummond. "It underscores the need for urgent reform."

Surveillance is the undercurrent in every tech conversation now, a lens for understanding our vulnerability and exposure to every part of the online world. This is not a choice between catching terrorists and what David Cameron astonishingly described as some "la-di-da, airy fairy" views on free speech and the right to privacy. If we are happy to accept that our online lives are best represented by Google, Skype, Yahoo, Facebook and all the rest, despite the compromises we make on those commercial platforms, then we have to hope they have the best chance of clawing back our right to free expression and privacy, our right to relate the world around us without being watched.

Returning to Orwell, what will the state of our surveillance nation be in 2031? The worst that can happen is that the whole lot comes true.