Belated questions from last week and the future
I apologize to everyone. I messed up last week and read the Network Aesthetics book. Reading week was extremely hectic and I made the mistake, so I had to spend the weekend reading The Immersive Worlds Handbook to develop my questions for the week.
1) An artificial intelligence system being developed at Facebook has created its own language. It developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient. Researchers shut the system down when they realized the AI was no longer using English. The observations made at Facebook are the latest in a long line of similar cases. In each instance, an AI being monitored by humans has diverged from its training in English to develop its own language. The resulting phrases appear to be nonsensical gibberish to humans but contain semantic meaning when interpreted by AI “agents.” – James Walker, Digital Journal http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/a-step-closer-to-skynet-ai-invents-a-language-humans-can-t-read/article/498142
Why are we pursuing an AI, only to shut it down when it shows the intelligence and initiative that we are trying to get it to create? If we’re that afraid of it then why are we doing it?
2) Can the long term influence and effect of AI on our culture and more importantly, our economy ever be understood before we’ve fully committed to it?
3) Can an AI be taught to understand social history and social progress and our goals as a species to be better in order for it to contribute to our society?
And now for questions from Network Aesthetics:
1) We have networked novels, movies, and videogames, the American military speaks of “network-centric warfare” to fight terrorist networks, we have television and radio networks, and collectively human beings form a network that, collectively, has more information than any one individual much like the internet.
Are computer networks, for data or art or anything a new idea or is it a result our our growing realization that networks are, possibly, a more natural state of life similiar to fractals?
2) Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo speak of “the capacity for aesthetics to ground a post-identity collectively.” By this they make examples of book clubs and the cinema, but say it applies more to online cultural works like video games. (141)
Is this simply another way to catagorize hobbyists or is this something deeper?
3)“Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.” (179)
How much longer are we going to be able to ‘hide’ from each other? Is this a worry or will the market demand that ability to maintain our individual privacy?
4) “In her study, Turkle returns repeatedly to the way that daily use of networked technologies reveals ‘a certain fatigue with the difficulties of life with people.’ “Today,” she writes, “our machine dream is to be never alone but always in control. This can’t happen when one is fact-to-face with a person.”” (179)
Is technology becoming a substitute for human contact? How is this affecting day to day relationships and how we deal with other people?