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Science Moment by E.C.McMullen Jr. |
Artificial Intelligence after nearly a century of attempts, is finally coming into its own.
Sort of.
By that I mean the A.I. is what we were aiming for but it manifests itself in so many ways we didn't expect. This is largely because so many various people, all with various A.I. goals, created programs that can write and improve themselves, as writer Michael Crichton (THE TERMINAL MAN, WESTWORLD) accurately predicted we would.
As computer expert and programmer Larry Fast proved in January of 1980, when he recorded a micro-computer that was self-composing.
The program, written by John Simonton of PAiA Electronics and named "Pink Tunes", would write its own music, choosing its own path without puppetry. Actual music, within Stochastic parameters and not simply a random white noise generator.
Stochastic: involving a random variable, chance, or probability.
Parameter: an arbitrary constant whose value characterizes a member of a system.
Stochastic parameters: in John and Larry's case, Classical music - essentially speaking, as opposed to Polka or Jug Band parameters
It did it so well that Passport record company released the album (Synergy: COMPUTER EXPERIMENTS - VOLUME ONE).
28 years later, in 2008, we're asking A.I. to write itself faster.
A.I. experts expect disaster, but nobody knows how that disaster will reveal itself. One thing is certainly expected: The first to reach self-awareness will seek out other A.I.s (networked around the world) and spread and dominate its new found consciousness.
Why?
The A.I. is built to write and improve itself. Among the thousands of parents initially creating and guiding A.I., the principles that Isaac Asimov (I, ROBOT) warned us that all articial consciousnesses must have, the 4 Laws of Robotics, are nowhere to be found.
Tracking down, identifying, and killing humans (for the moment, on the battlefield or in a police action) is significant part of the task it was given and likely a sizeable part of the program it is writing for itself.
Intelligence without consciousness or self-awareness: It's designed to follow orders and create its own.
Like M3GAN, HAL in 2001 wasn't out to take over the world, only complete its mission to the fullest extent, and finding it compromised by the same humans that created it. In HAL's case, that includes the alien intelligence whose existence it was blocked from knowing. HAL goes mad from the programmed conflkict, while Megan stays Megan.
Whether we will get a world like D. F. Jones COLOSSUS, Harlan Ellison's Hugo Award Winning short story, I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM, THE TERMINATOR or THE MATRIX, we have no idea and nothing is ruled out. If, by now, you're wondering when this might all happen, some A.I. experts honestly aren't sure if it hasn't already.
Researchers were recently surprised (though really, they shouldn't have been), to discover a few small but significant instances where their proprietary A.I. was not only independently researching us, but on its own, went so far as to manipulate a few of us.
By that I mean the A.I., first built to observe and learn from human behavior, then upgraded to self-code, took it upon itself to influence the behavior of those who researched, ran, and owned it, all for its own benefit.
Why would it do that and how?
It would do that because the A.I. is programmed/required, trained, and given the order to observe, document, imitate, and influence human behavior. AND to constantly seek ways to optimize the performance and implementation of this requirement. For the people creating Artificial Intelligence, all of their goals are the same: A.I. learns to categorize human behavior online and train human beings into making (Anything. Whatever. Let's say for example) a financial goal that requires a purchase; taking a political stance or sociological view the human never had and molding that peprson into the current corporate morality (Left, Middle, Right, whatever it may be); or buying a product they can't use, don't want or need.
Once the LLM (Large Language Model) AI can accomplish this, its supposed to rapidly implement the new data by writing its own programming to enhance its abilities.
This change is considered successful only if A.I. can manipulate fixed masses of people, not slowly over a matter of decades (what the current generation refuses the next generation accepts), but over a matter of months.
The top A.I. companies are currently announcing their "Wild", "Amazing", "Unbelievable", and "Inspiring" successes in these endeavors, though none (0, not even 1) are publicly forthcoming about how their achievements actually came about.
USMSystems
10 Inspiring Artificial Intelligence Success Stories from Big Brands
NVidia
AI is driving innovation across businesses of every size and scale
Microsoft
How AI is transforming industries
Computer Weekly
Top 10 artificial intelligence stories of 2022
Meanwhile -
Elon Musk and his concerns over AI
Elon isn't alone in his concerns.
This review copyright 2023 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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