Funny, you know I hang out around TV circles and forums and I don't
recall anyone saying that "Person of Interest" made history. Perhaps
your grandfatherly crush on Ms Acker is clouding your judgment a bit. :-D
I caught an episode or two when it started but thought it was typical
formulaic American TV and I had much better things to watch. But as far
as being predictive even the title is something that emerged with the
rise of the American Fascist State after 9/11 with our Nazi-like
Homeland Security and Patriot Act. You're forgetting "A Scanner Darkly"
which predates that show not to mention "1984" and even Fritz Lang's
"Metropolis", not to mention numerous science fiction novels and short
stories. In a way I thought that "Person of Interest" was trying to
acclimatize Americans to the idea of constantly being watched. Right
now they're trying to foment a lot of fear over ISIS and Ebola to take
away even more of our civil liberties. Folks, don't stand for it.
Of course now we can watch the neighborhood ourselves as more and more
of us get surveillance cameras being that the systems are affordable and
don't require some monthly extortion fee from a security company. Funny
thing there as a kid in the 1950s I would get the yearly Allied Radio
catalog where I would buy electronic kits to build. But my dream thing
to own back then in the late 1950s was a $300 TV camera they sold. It's
main use was for business owners to hook up to a TV as a security
camera. Needless to say I never came up with the $300.
As for AI, it could very well be a danger. After all the intellect is
binary, just "yes" or "no". At the company I worked for in the 1990s a
team was trying to build a product that would emulate human behavior.
They were doing so by processing a long list of memes. I told them that
was too complicated and mentioned that the intellect was binary and the
human mind not that complicated. They thought I was nuts until one of
our project leads came across a graduate paper published by a Berkeley
student which demonstrated just that. The product shipped with just a
few variables which reliably did emulate human behavior.
Where did my idea come from? Indian philosophy.
On 10/26/2014 03:41 AM, TurquoiseBee turquoi...@yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife] wrote:
The most intelligent examination of AI in the entertainment world
these days is a TV show called "Person Of Interest," created by
Jonathon Nolan. Nolan is the brother of Christopher Nolan, and was
co-writer of many of his big hits, such as "The Dark Night," "The Dark
Knight Rises," "The Prestige," and the short story on which his
brother's "Memento" was based. He'll also be the writer of his
brother's upcoming "Interstellar," already getting great reviews in
previews.
"Person Of Interest" made history by predicting a complex arrangement
of computers and closed-circuit TV and surveillance equipment so vast
and so uncontrolled that it could watch literally every minute of our
lives. Interestingly, Nolan did this and put it on mainstream TV
*before* Snowdon blew the whistle and revealed that the NSA had this
ability in real life and was *already* watching pretty much every
moment of our lives.
The main difference in "Person Of Interest" is that the force behind
all of this uber-surveillance is "the machine," an AI developed by
Harold Finch (Michael Emerson from "Lost"). In the early seasons this
AI gains sentience and begins to help Finch and his associates keep
normal people from harm. But in the last two seasons it's taken a far
darker turn, as a competing AI has entered the picture, and now they
are dueling in cyberspace, trying to establish dominance.
It's actually a fun and entertaining series. I particularly like Amy
Acker as Root, a brilliant computer nerd/psychopath who first starts
as an enemy of "the machine" and who later becomes its disciple. Yes,
disciple. It "sees all, and knows all," so what, after all,
distinguishes it from God?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* "anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]"
<FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
*To:* FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
*Sent:* Saturday, October 25, 2014 11:04 PM
*Subject:* [FairfieldLife] Re: Rise of the Machines
The dangers of human intelligence are known well enough. Maybe we
should try something different? The problem is we are creating AI, if
it mimics us, we can expect it to do the things we do. Regardless of
whether we regard machines as conscious or not (an unanswered
philosophical question), machines can be aware of their environment in
a mechanistic sense (suspiciously like how we are aware of our
environment). A real AI machine would be a self learner and how
dangerous such a machine might be would probably be determined how
autonomously it can function in the world and how complex its neural
net is.
This has been the fodder of science fiction (Colossus:The Forbin
Project; 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator series of motion
pictures) where the technology goes awry. On the other hand science
fiction has positive examples of this (City; The Bicentennial Man; The
City and the Stars; andI Robot to name a few novels) where artificial
intelligence is generally presented as beneficial in relation to
biological organisms.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jr_esq@...> wrote :
Elon Musk warns of the dangers of artificial intelligence. Is he right?
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102121127?__source=yahoo%7Cfinance%7Cheadline%7Cheadline%7Cstory&par=yahoo&doc=102121127#.
<http://www.cnbc.com/id/102121127?__source=yahoo%7Cfinance%7Cheadline%7Cheadline%7Cstory&par=yahoo&doc=102121127#.>
