When I first started reading about Artificial Intelligence, AI, the thoughts that kept playing around in my mind were thoughts of movies like the cyborg in Minority Report and the robots with feelings and thoughts in IRobots. I also thought about the little boy that wasn’t really human in the Spielberg's movie “Artificial Intelligence” and it made the whole concept fascinating because of how Sci Fi movies have painted the picture, it couldn't possibly be real. However, the concept of AI became a bit scary especially after seeing what Stellarc formerly known as Stelios Arcadiou had done with the Internet and the human body.
According to his website -http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/biog/biog.html, Stellarc, who among other things is the chairperson in the Performance Art Department, School of Arts, Brunel University West London, UK , developed the “FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis through a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE probed notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. Current projects include the EXTRA EAR- a surgically constructed ear as an additional facial feature that coupled with a modem and a wearable computer will act as an Internet antenna, able to hear RealAudio sounds”. He also claimed that the human body is both a zombie and a cyborg that has always relied on one form of technology or the other to exist.
Most recently, the IDriver made headlines when the Appirion firm made up of researchers in the artificial intelligence team at the Free University of Berlin launched this new technology which has the ability to convert the iPhone into a controller pad just like a video game pad, capable of directing a two ton minivan. To add to that, I have read about Japan’s first teacher robot that can show about 7 different human emotions (
http://www.robotliving.com/2009/03/06/japans-first-robot-teacher/) and even robots that cook rice. I couldn’t help the thoughts that humans might be evolving again, this time from homo sapiens to robosapiens. It was both disturbing and yet consoling to know that I was not the only one to have come up with that thought. one of the people to buy into this ideology is Michio Kaku, American theoretical physicist who shares some of my uneasy opinions concerning AI and the future of man.According to the professor, in about 50 to 100 years from now the computer silicon chip that has been responsible for the laudable achievements in computing today would come to an end and would be replaced with the birth of quantum computers. These proposed kind of computers has the abilities to break complicated codes and even operate with the speed of the human thought. Kaku said it might not be long before robots would relegate humans to the background or even keep them in zoos and they would be in charge. “Robots with human-level intelligence may finally become a reality, and in the ultimate stage of mastery, we’ll even be able to merge our minds with machine intelligence,” he said. Thus he has proposed that a chip called ASIMOV should be implanted in robots from now so that when they begin to propose a threat like wanting to overtake humans, the chip would disengage and shut them down.
Now that is a freak show even Spilberg didn’t see this coming.
References:
iDriver - iPhone remote controlled car: Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHDwKT564Kk (Accessed November, 2009)
Michio Kaku on Artificial Intelligence: Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW8rgKLPHMg (Accessed November 2009)
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