More Video Research

So now that we've narrowed our topic down, most of my earlier research is inapplicable. What I really think I need to be looking into now is AI (artificial intelligence), since our series of sketches revolves around the idea that the everyday technologies that we interact with have their own conciousness or sentience. We as humans want to make machines that can do things on their own to make our lives easier, but the more complex and effective they become, the more likely we are to fear them. I want to look at our ideas about AI, both realistic and fantastic.

The first thing I think about when I think about machines that can think is Isaac Asimov--more specifically his three laws of robotics. I'm posting the Wikipedia link giving a good overview of his concept here. They reveal something important about what we as humans want out of technology--servants that can't complain and can't hurt us. If we were to give the things we use everyday the ability to "think" so that they could interact with us, it would be a bit like making slaves. It's not unreasonable to imagine that things that we created to think the way we do might grow to be unsatisfied with that role and revolt.

Here is a link to a nice FAQ sort of thing regarding AI today--what it is, what it might be used for, and so on:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/

Here are the results of an informal survey (on somebody else's blog) regarding the fear of intelligent machines, and the dialogue in the comments afterwards is pretty interesting:

http://www.thinkartificial.org/web/the-fear-of-intelligent-machines-survey-results/

And lastly for now, here is an essay about human fear of intelligent machines in literature which I thought was interesting.

More later.

--The Wombat