I think one disappointing thing about the Terminator franchise is that I often feel as though it’s cooked up by people who have no background in science. In order to always up the ante and make the system more frightening and powerful, they go completely off the deep end until it’s not credible at all. Then, it’s just disappointing for people who’d really like to find it provocative, and stimulating, and scary.
Sure, Artificial Intelligence May End Our World, But That Is Not the Main Problem
Enter Skynet. Along with his tech-savvy partner on the project, the electronics engineer Grant Bajema, Burchat has designed a barcoded and GPS-tagged net that he believes could be mounted on the homes, balconies and backyards of the near future. The opulent gulf state wants to lead what it predicts will be a $10bn industry by 2025, and has offered a US$1m prize to the most promising concept.
Pentagon officials are worried that the US military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China, and are willing to explore almost anything to stay on top—including creating watered-down versions of the Terminator. Taken together, the “scientific revolutions” catalogued by the NDU report—if militarized—would grant the Department of Defense (DoD) “disruptive new capabilities” of a virtually totalitarian quality. Pentagon-funded research on data-mining feeds directly into fine-tuning the algorithms used by the US intelligence community to identify not just ‘terror suspects’, but also targets for the CIA’s drone-strike kill lists.It is far from clear that the Pentagon’s Skynet-esque vision of future warfare will actually reach fruition. That the aspiration is being pursued so fervently in the name of ‘national security,’ in the age of austerity no less, certainly raises questions about whether the most powerful military in the world is not so much losing its edge, as it is losing the plot.
Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.
Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction.We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it.
RT @wikileaks: Why are Univision, Disney, Google behind global revolution "Rise Up!" event in Washington DC?
Ray Kurzweil popularised the Teminator-like moment he called the 'singularity', when artificial intelligence overtakes human thinking. But now the man who hopes to be immortal is involved in the very same quest – on behalf of the tech behemoth. Although possibly this is what Kurzweil's critics, such as the biologist PZ Myers, mean when they say that the problem with Kurzweil's theories is that "it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad." Or Jaron Lanier, who calls him "a genius" but "a product of a narcissistic age".
Le rôle diplomatique secret de Google dénoncé par Julian Assange