In the image of man. AI robotics Is there anything to fear from this? In the 15th century, Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press. Not long after, Swiss botanist, Conrad Gessner, warned that printed books would create an information overload that would be confusing and harmful to the modern human mind. Has a library ever intimidated anyone here? Will a virtual cloud of information processed at the quantum level, integrated with robotics and interacting neural networks within the human brain intimidate us, overwhelm us, make us subservient? In 1982 while working as a natural history teacher, I took a trip north deep into the Maine woods to visit a good friend from college. He lived on a ten acre organic farm with his wife, child and various animals, and had wanted me to buy an adjoining ten acre woodland, with a really neat log cabin. The price was good. “This would be a perfect place for you to write…” After a fun day on the farm with everyone there, I went out to my car to get a shoulder pack. My friend had some very good hand-scrawled poetry which I wanted to help him get published. In front of the fireplace, I unzippered the pack… and pulled out what then was a modern laptop. A very heavy, slow and primitive thing by today’s standards, with a battery that lasted an hour if lucky, no real graphics capability, with two floppy drives (one for the program and the other to store data) but no hard-drive. And my friend totally freaked out, almost yelling at me to get that thing back in my car. “That’s how Big Brother will get us,” he said, referring to George Orwell’s book, 1984, which had been a hot topic of discussion back in the day, when a group of friends gathered at his apartment after classes to play RISK, listen to Jethro Tull, and sometimes listen to his captivating narrative poetry, sagas really, over good beer and good weed. I spent the rest of that evening in vain trying to explain to my dear friend that this was just a tool, like a hammer that can build a house. youtu.be/S5AnWzjHtWA
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 06:07:42 +0000
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