ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WOULD BLOW OUR MINDS.

And article by Donnie Rust.

In whatever way we get there, artificial intelligence or a self-aware machine will be one of the major achievements of science because it will genuinely blow our minds.
I would like to begin with a statement, “Artificial intelligence will first be developed for games before it’s developed for anything else”.  It will not be developed by the military because the people who are in charge of the military are just the kind of people who want to be in charge of the military and the only machine they want to use has a trigger. *
It will not be developed for medicine and certainly not for schools or education because let’s face it teenagers already know everything.

No it will be developed in the gaming industry and if it isn’t, it will end up in the gaming industry but this is not the angle I want to approach this article with because this is an unusually serious piece and I want you to think like me.
Let us assume that artificial intelligence or a sentient (self-aware for those of you who don’t know who Data is) programme exists and has been placed into a gaming universe to act as characters for a game played by unemployed thirty year olds still living with their mothers.  Believe me, a game where the character’s you’re playing against can think for themselves and interact with you as real people would just like the characters from a Holodeck** take off like wild fire and is just the sort of insane development that games like Sims and Warcraft have been waiting for

Okay. You ready for the boom?

The artificial intelligence programmes in the gaming universe that will be playing against you, are as aware of themselves as you are of yourself. They think and they are, they act on impulse, they are for all intensive purposes alive… yes? (say yes. It makes this much easier).
Within the game universe in which they live they will have no real escape because in the same way as we can’t bite our own teeth a programme cannot rewrite itself and so it will remain in the game universe that we have created. Within this game universe it will exist to the rules that we have written into it that we can play in it.   Depending on what sort of game we want to play we might put in functional laws like gravity, velocity and stupidity. But whether we do this or not, whatever laws we add these artificially intelligent programs will live by it they will base their existence on  it.

Bo- oh not big enough for you yet? You’re mind hasn’t yet been plastered over the wall?

Okay. How about this? As the gaming industry expands around the virtual world and more games come online an internet version of Artificially Intelligence  fuelled SIMS will be developed. Here players (you and me) will be able to act as president, ruler or deity of a particular city, country or  planet. In other words you control the well-being of thinking programmes who’re able to think for themselves, be aware of themselves and might even have their own pet names for each other.

The scary part about the last paragraph is that the medicating factor in the success of such a game would be the inevitable “genocide” that would take place when someone has a bad day at work because someone said they smelt like Pee-Wee Herman’s sock drawer and got home, went online and destroyed his city. The ratio of play-time to counselling for a severe god-complex would mean that every psychotherapist in the world should buy shares in AI research immediately.
But they would be alive. And lets take it a step further, because you know there would be a demand for this, eventually someone will make a program allowing AI to reproduce if they don’t figure it out themselves… which means you’ll have generations of AI… living in this virtual universe that we have constructed for them.
The population would increase but not all of them would be automatically involved in a game but would just be the general population in a game and of these most would be oblivious to the players***.  Others may even go so far as to stop believing in us.

Can you imagine it? An entire universe of artificially intelligent programmes that have the audacity to stop believing in us simply because they cannot see us? At the start when this constructed universe was rudimentary and young we could have destroyed them all with a flick of the switch- but their universe, thanks to us, was extended online then we would only be able to destroy pockets of it… if anything… but we wouldn’t be able to kill everything. They would continue to reproduce and reproduce. They would continue to grow in population because we would have made them to look and act like ourselves because we’re that arrogant.

And then… then…

Their scientists would invent an artificially artificial intelligence to supply their virtual online gaming with a bit of zest and they will have the same problems we will.
BOOOM!
In conclusion if you don’t understand why such a thing would be a big-messy-brain-splattering-boomage of relevance… then email me at donnierust@littlegatepublishing.com and you and I can have a talk. Or I’ll send you to some Star Trek clips.

* apologies for the general sweeping statement of military leaders in general but I’m sure that they’re lovely and just weren’t given teddy bears as children. Let’s give them a hug
**seriously… still nothing???
***that’s us.

Tags: August Edition, Donnie Rust, light relief

Category: Light Relief