Artificial Intelligence

Perhaps a little out of context, but an interesting read nonetheless.

Opportunists believe the mindset that was established over 50 years ago. Hollywood made movies showing the destruction of the human race from self conscious robots. This mindset was under the belief that making a smart intelligent robot would be easy. Predictions were made that talking to robots would be just around the corner. Herbert Simon an American political scientist said in 1956, “Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do.” It still hasn’t occurred. Igor Aleksander who is the head of intelligence and interactive systems says that “Even if the artificial system could be said to conscious. It will be conscious of being a machine with a defined purpose. It is an act of considerable sensationalism to suggest that such a system will confuse itself with humans and their purposes and then attempt to compete with humans.” We as humans will not allow artificial intelligence to evolve up to a point, where we have lost control with what we have created. Evolving artificial intelligence comprises of many small steps towards a goal. We won’t be able to create robots that will take over the world overnight. The book titled “Robot” says that we would have to deliberately build robots without any fail safes or we build robots to deliberately outsmart us. It also presents the following case “We will know when we are close to building machines over which we will have no control, as before that we will have machines over which we have little control, and before that we will have machines over which we occasionally lose control. It will take many tens of thousands of people working together to get from, where we are today with our robots to one that we could not control” The future of artificial intelligence as viewed by most of the population is that robots will be able to help us to mundane or dangerous tasks. This interaction between us and them will be strong, but we will always have the upper hand.

I am interested in your comments about this article, so please feel free to discuss.

Mobile phones: how young is too young?

I was recently asked by my cousin (age 7 years) at what age did I own my mobile phone. I answered her truthfully and said, when I was 15. The reason behind this question was that some of her friends in her year already had mobile phones, which begs the question, How young is too young to own a mobile phone?

The general routine for a seven year old kid is: wake up, go to school and return home. Where is the time for using a mobile phone? The simple answer is, there is none. However parents give in to their child’s consistent pleads with a common chant being, “everyone else has one, why can’t I?” This is a scary thought, are we depriving our kids from the opportunity in just being kids? We want them to grow up to be responsible adults but this doesn’t mean we need to immerse them so heavily in this environment at their age.

Additionally by giving kids their own mobile phone, they will not understand the finances involved in paying for these pieces of equipment let alone the monthly bills. We may make our child more popular at school, but we are teaching our kids the wrong ideals. We need to teach them to value money and not just accept that it comes out of thin air.

I close, by saying that I believe that when a child can pay in full for their mobile phone and the additional costs that accompany it, then they may own this piece of technology.

As a side note ~ in Australia the number of mobiles exceeds population. There is a total of 21.26 mobile phones in operation around this country. This is surely a scary figure.

Technology dependence

We live in a world were technology is pervasive, but are we relying on this activity too much? Are we addicted or does our thirst for knowledge justify the heavy and prolonged usage of the wonderful world of technology?

Ok, enough of the rhetorical questions.

We have had people in society who have died from overuse of the computer. There was a Chinese man in beijing you died after playing a video game for 3 days straight; this is certainly an indication that we need to regularly review our time spent with technology or face the disastrous consequences.

I know this is only one example of the consequences on relying on technology too much but I sign off with this statement:

It is naïve to think there is a way to escape the alluring nature of technology, however; if we maintain our vigilance we can prevent our generations metamorphosing into a computer dependent socio-economic group. Letting our guard down, even for a second can spell disaster and the repercussions for such ignorance can be catastrophic, as our young generation continues to be readily absorbed into this unhealthy past time.