Artificial Intelligence

[alex_greene]

And when all else fails, send in Jim Kirk.

 

[Jak Nazryth]

Kirk = Plasma

 

[Jak Nazryth]

I take it back...
He once convinced a computer to destroy itself!
Kirk... psychologist and executioner!

 

[Reynard]

He convinced a lot of computers to destroy themselves. Star Trek was never friendly towards high end thinking machines or, it seemed, robots in general. There was an overall mindset that robots and computers were part of the woodwork, functional but transparent. True tools.

 

[heron61]

Most of the robot car dreamers are highly networked urban oriented.

Slightly more than half the human species now live in cities, this is predicted to be 80% by 2050, so that's where an increasing amount of driving will be done.

Robots should never replace humans, they should enhance human production and service as tools. I love those scifi illustrations showing humanity as all artists and scientists surrounded by armies of slave like automations tending to every want and need so a human never lifts a finger in physical labors. That to me is the utopia of the upper class, not humanity.

Machines of various sorts replacing human labor has been happening for well more than a century - that's why we now have 2% of the US population farming rather than 80+%. This trend is also absolutely going to continue. China opened its first fully automated factory a little while ago: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com...d-by-robots/articleshow/48238331.cms?from=mdr.

We're headed for a future where we'll either need to eventually lower full time work to 20 hours a week or less (presumably in a series of gradual decreases), while increasing pay per hour or deal with 50+% of the population not working. This isn't even a long term prediction anymore, it's already starting and by 2020 will be pretty obvious. My PoV is that some form of basic income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income will be necessary in much of the developed world within 20 years if we don't want serious social problems.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

We're headed for a future where we'll either need to eventually lower full time work to 20 hours a week or less (presumably in a series of gradual decreases), while increasing pay per hour or deal with 50+% of the population not working. This isn't even a long term prediction anymore, it's already starting and by 2020 will be pretty obvious. My PoV is that some form of basic income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income will be necessary in much of the developed world within 20 years if we don't want serious social problems.

Cities will go bankrupt before then because of baby boomers wanting their free stuff at retirement time.

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Anonymous]

Wait a minute!, Kirk is definitely artificial but intelligent? Now you're pushing credibility a little too far...

As for the Dalek, I don't recall the details on how Davros made them, I just remember their gooey brains and hiding behind the sofa...

 

[Condottiere]

I've considered the possibility that they are his vat grown offspring.

 

[dragoner]

I did not imagine that this thread would keep going so when I made that table. But let me drop a bomb, looking at T5 for higher tech stuff, as the players are heading to a TL16 world, my little table seems to follow the paradigm that T5 lays out for tech.

Daleks are organic, mutants, not AI.

And another thing, heron61 is right about the work week, time spent at work trended up from 16th-17th centuries as peasants rights were lost (the tragedy of the commons and all that), and has been trending downward since the early 20th century. The whole punch the clock, too afraid to punch the boss, one hour of labor, equals one production unit's capacity for labor, is a Victorian idea. Marx was big on that idea, and people were often reduced to "labor units", something explored in We by Zamyatin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

 

[Anonymous]

I've considered the possibility that they are his vat grown offspring.

That's my memory too but I am not a Dr Who fan these days, it's part of my (dusty) childhood.

 

[Nobby-W]

There's lots of conjecture with regard to AI and "losing the plot".

Is it fair or "realistic"?

...

There was an experiment with a neural network designed to recognise something or other - image recognition IIRC. They trained the buggery out of it and then it started to produce erratic results, getting worse than before.

The researchers couldn't figure out what it was doing, and finally concluded that it had gotten bored.

Plus, there was all the fun stuff with images generated by the Deep Dream application (really I think it should have been called 'Deep Trip.')

Sure A.I. could be unreliable.

 

[Condottiere]

They've started cloning brain tissue with skin stem cells, so there's the organic option.