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Experiments to build artificial
intelligences go back a long way. Well before the modern
age men have sought to build or endow intelligence onto
machines. The classical Greek mythology is full of intelligent
machines and devices and while men such as Hero and Daedalus
constructed the hardware, philosophers like Aristotle invented
the first formal deductive reasoning system for machines known as
syllogistic logic.
And so it has continued until
today, several thousand years later, when we are coming to a
point where we can see the beginnings of real artificial
intelligence brought about by our advanced knowledge of
technology.
Where it will lead us is uncertain.
There are really no technological limits apparently, and what we
do with our intelligent machines and to what extent and purpose
we develop them is another part of the ethical and moral issue
surrounding artificial intelligence.
There are many
science fiction stories, movies and television series about
(android) robots being a part of human society, living and
working with us in harmony. In other scenarios, intelligent machines, not at
all remotely looking like humans, are at war with us for
dominance.
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One of the more popular story lines concerns
military equipment with a mind of its own, fighting our battles
for us against another (robot) army, or at war with us, their
makers. All of these robots and machines have artificial
intelligence in one form or another. Would you be
surprised if machines turn against us? If we start to make them
smarter than us, more efficient, and without the reasoning
aspects which make us rationally weak, they are bound to see us
for what we really are - soft bodied, weak-willed, chaotic,
illogical creatures that basically parasite off the planet until
there is nothing left. Not a pretty picture perhaps, but
certainly a side of the truth most of us don't like to think of.
Well, machines don't have that choice, do they? So ridding the
place of humans makes perfect logic to them. Historical
disasters have all been attributed to the gods taking revenge on
us for our bad behavior. God made us in his image according to
Biblical history, and now we are making machines in ours. We
have destroyed all the old gods and are busily considering the
remaining few irrelevant as we become gods ourselves. Why would
future history show anything else than our extinction at the
hands of those we created in our own image?
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