Has anyone read Charles Stross? I like him and just finished Rule 34.
Posted by
CovingtonCat
Feb 13 '13, 15:05
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It was a lot of fun. Set about 10 years from now in Edinburgh. It's a murder mystery. Spammers (& others) are dying in unusual ways - death by enema by a machine once owned by a former Romanian dictator is the first. Here's an excerpt that I found interesting that got me thinking about AI in a different way...
"What people think of when you say 'artificial intellegence' is basically stuff they've glommed onto via the media. HAL 9000 or Neuromancer-artificial consciousness. But consciousness-we know how that shit works these days, via analytical cognitive neurobiology and synthetic neurocomputing. And it's not very *interesting*. We can't *do* stuff with it. Worst case-suppose I were to sit down with my collegues and we came up with a traditional brain-in-a-box type AI, shades of HAL 9000. What then? Firstly, it opens a huge can of ethical worms-once you turn it on, does turning it off again qualify as murder? What about software updates? Bug fixes, even? Secondly, it's not very *useful*. Even if you cut the Gordian knot and declare that because it's a machine, it's a slave, you can't make it *do* anything useful. Not unless you've built in some way of punishing it, in which case we're off into the ethical mine-field on a pogo-stick tour. Human consciousness isn't optimized *for* anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.
"So we're not very interested in reinventing human consciousness in a box. What gets the research grants flowing is *applications*- and that's (spoiler)."
There's a lot social networking stuff, too. I'm pretty sure Spawn would like it. Because some of the social networking stuff shows how evil it can become.
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