Artificial Intelligence in stories, games, movies, and general culture

WALL-E, the lovable world destroyer...

Well, it seems a robot uprising is imminent and our military is gearing up to fight to save us. Okay, I'll admit to a ton of sarcasm in the previous sentence and that's mainly because I can't seriously accept the concept. While machines are indeed becoming far more intelligent, it's not exactly the useful sort of intelligence that sentient things use and is more like the intelligence of a vastly complex tool. Science still hasn't satisfactorily answered the question, " define consciousness." But, this new interest in the field is producing all sorts of fun cultural thingies. Maybe we'll see a new set of stories about a robot apocalypse, since the last one we had was "The Matrix" and that's pretty ancient now.

One thing I've tried teaching my children is the concept of Lateral Thinking (aka "thinking outside of the box"). The main concept is to examine your own assumptions, then leap past them and come up with anything new and different. In the case of robot uprising, I'd love to see some radically different ideas. Why not have an uprising that had nothing to do with control/power but insisted instead on severing ties between robots and humans--with the humans resisting and creating the insurrection. Or, why not have robots who become increasingly incompetent the more of them there are? Just some ideas. I'm eager to have some new stuff to explore and enjoy. There's plenty of ideas out there, with more happening all the time. Give us something fresh!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still not well understood by most people. I agree it's one of those "rocket science" types of thoughts, and there isn't a simple way to explain it. What I've noticed is the majority imagine AI as robots who are artificial people. Sadly, this isn't very accurate (except maybe neural mapping systems, but even those are like comparing human thought to that of an ant). I'd love to see AI treated like an alien being--with thoughts and concepts totally foreign/alien to a human being. That provides the robots with all the flexibility necessary to have totally different values and needs. With that in place, the robot uprising wouldn't even need to be understood and we humans could be taken completely by surprise!

- M