El transhumanismo.

¿Habéis pensado alguno las consecuencias que podría suponer la consecución de tal idea?

¿Inmortalidad?
¿Posibilidad de explorar todos los estados de la conciencia?

Diferencias sociales extremas entre los que pueden acceder a la tecnología y los que no.
¿Hay alguien que merezca vivir para siempre?

Con posibilidad de mejorar infinitamente, ¿qué sentido tendría estar? ¿Valdría para algo el dinero?

A día de hoy son sólo teorías, nadie lo ha sentido, sólo hay quien cree que pasará, y quien quiere que pase, claro. ¿Tenéis fe en algo? ¿En una religión?

Escribid diferencias entre transhumanismo y religión. Si te has tomado un par de minutos en leer estas preguntas sin sentido, tómate uno en dejar un comentario, de cualquier tipo, y a ver que sale de ahí.

Adiós.

Transhumanism.

Bye.

Frankenstein is a novel published in the 19th century, the gold age of horror literature. At that time, some authors as Bram Stoker, Edgar Alan Poe, or Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer wrote their main works. However, this blog is not a horror blog, but artificial intelligence has sometimes inspired these novels. Even though Frankenstein isn’t about robots that will dominate the world, or conscious machines, doctor Victor Frankenstein and his assistant whished to create life from nothing. For this cause, the doctor put together some body parts of dead people. His intentions are to bring to life the monster he has constructed, and to get it to have its own conscience. Dr Frankenstein achieves his objetive: the monster receives the life spark from the lightning and it stands up.

The goal of the AI is similar. Our purpose is that an inert thing, as a silicon board, can think, learn, feel and have conscience. So, artificial inteligence is the life spark that Victor Frankenstein sends to his creature.

But, this novel has a moral: the subtitle of this story is “the Modern Prometheus”, and so the message is obvious: don’t play to be God, because you will finish tied in the highest peak of a mountain and a eagle will eat your liver. In the novell, the doctor regrets having created a monster, so he escapes and he leaves his creation alone. The criature is rejected by society, and isn’t understood, it is angry and starts a crime wave. This story is similar to HAL-9000’s, Skynet’s and other sci-fi stories that talk about AI development.

Are we falling in the errors that were already predicted in the 19th century? Are we playing to be God?

BONUS: Perharps, Young Frankenstein is the best film about Frankenstein’s story.

As we have talked about in some occasions, “The Singularity” is a point in the future where the machines that we have built become capable of building more machines as intelligent as themselves.

There are a lot of discussion about this topic; some people argue that this is an utopic issue, but other ones are absolutely sure about The Singularity.

The November 2, a group of scientists (all from the United States), joined to deal with this topic. In fact, they discussed about the future of artificial intelligence, or more specifically, about questions like these ones:

• Could robots eventually become so smart that they pose a threat to society?
• Is it necessary to include an ethical and legal code about artificial intelligence?

Tom Mitchell, from Carnegie Mellon University, showed his worry about what people could do with artificial intelligence, not what machines themselves could do. Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft Researcher and ex-director of the Association for the advancement of Artificial intelligence (AAAI), was in the meeting too. In fact, Horvitz was the one who joined this group in order to write a report about this topic.

Horvitz said that this was the first time that AAAI merged to discuss about AI’s positive and negative impacts, and from my point of view, this is a good point, since technology evolves very fast and there is no problem in talking about the possible impacts (and I am not talking only about AI).

The most radical opinions were David McAllester’s and Manuela Veloso’s.

In one hand, David McAllester, professor and chief academic officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, believes that singularity is absolutely real, and that there is no way to avoid it in the future. Machines would be able to construct smarter and better versions of themselves and become infinitely intelligent.

In the other hand, Manuela Veloso, another professor from Carnegie Mellon, doesn’t think that Singularity is a future problem. She doesn’t believe that artificial intelligence would evolve that way. She declares herself as an engineer, and as a realistic person. Definitely, she observes robots as a medium for improving humanity’s well-being.

As it can be seen, there are various opinions about the topic, what is yours?

Source: PittsburghLive