|
The Dream, The Reality, The Fear
They are many who would wish to see the day that man's own thinking creations take human form. Think about it, such a intelligence could truely come in handy. It can be a true friend (nevertheless a robotic one) who would always listen to your problems and never give away secrets, it can be the best servant ever (doing everything tirelessly and with lightning perfection) or it can even work in research labs, doing all the thinking, calculations and brain cracking (that scientists spend a lifetime on) at thousand times the rate. And not to mention the fact that lots of time, money and even lifes would be saved, if the technology is put to use on automated surgeons (who would never make the slightest mistake), robotic firemen (who would walk into blazing fires to save a life) or on any of the countless possibilities Such possibilities have made many of us dream of such a day. Movies from all the way back (like "The Love Bug"(1968), a humorous film which features Herbie, a car(Volkswagen Beetle) with a mind of it's own) till today (eg. "Bicentennial Man Man" (2000) ,a touching film about a andriod trying to learn the true meaning of being human ) proves that man has long since until now, dream of a better companion in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As with the complications and moral issue involved with the recent fright by the breakthrough in genetic engineering (eg, the cloneing of the lamb, Dolly ), even more problems would arise should Artificial Intellgience finally reach/exceed human capablity. For example, to what extent should we treat the intelligence, since it too is capable of it's own thought, ideas and not to mention, schemes. And can we expect it to serve us as "servants" when it has on it's on a intellect superior to our own ? If we ever managed to create something smarter than ourselves, wouldn't we live in constant fear of being outsmarted by our own creation ? Nobody knows. The future is not for us to know. Over the past decade, many have become increasingly fasinated by many different possiblities surround AI, especially the bad ones. We've seen it all, Blockbuster movies like "The Terminator" series (about a killer cyborg sent back through time by a AI gone bad) and "The Matrix" (where a AI which considered the entire human race a virus, decided to destroy them, grow them in genetic fields and use them as a powersource) offen tell us stories of technology gone bad. Best selling novels and movies offen presents us with the most pessimistic point of view in the most frightening way. Movie or no movie, all we need to do is to put our imagination to work and we'll know that anything can happen. We cannot dismiss the possibility that the story tellers and movie script writers could be right. AI can be a Blessing for mankind and it could also mean the end of mankind in more than one way.
|
|||||||||||||||||||
