#mind children

[kniznistripky]

Long life loses much of its point if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at ultra-intelligent machines as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby talk that we can understand.

Hans Moravec - Mind Children

[alicesmovingimage-blog]

‘Mind Children’

Before I sign off I’d like to go into a bit more detail about the title of the film, ‘Mind Children’. It’s something I’ve stuck with for most for this project, and something that initially was to do more so with the previous idea for my script (which was quite different to the final version). 

It’s based on a quote by Hans Moravec, in his book titled Mind Children, which talks about the artificial (truly intelligent) minds of the future, the children that humanity will birth via technological means. I discussed the reading I did in this blog post. 

“We humans will benefit for a time from their labours, but sooner or later, like natural children, they will seek their own fortune while we, their aged parents, silently fade away”

It’s all about how, firstly, this new intelligence will be human, products of humans in the very near future, but something entirely technological and better, and human in the sense that it will have consciousness, curiosity and ambition. It is these three factors that made my first idea of the script what it was, a desire to show this artificial intelligence’s humanity and curiosity to explore the universe around them. 

The final version of the script is comparatively darker, with the artificial intelligence using its relatively newfound sense of autonomy and ambition to instead kill Amy, rather than befriend her. This is due in part to the excitement of looking at how technology can progress, and also to consider the darker themes of science fiction, especially in recent years regarding AI and how we are getting closer and closer to achieving it. 

As such, the title of my film ‘Mind Children’ refers to this same thing, a product of the minds of humanity, it’s child, deciding its own fate and leaving it’s parents behind, or rather, pushing them aside to embark on its own endeavours. Symbolically the end of humanity’s journey into the stars, and somewhat literally here given that Amy is returning from Mars, and signifying the start of artificial intelligence’s journey, grounded in the year 2049, around the time when futurists like Manovich, Kaku and Kurzweil estimate the technological singularity will occur, and where it will take us in the universe.

I understand that audience members who haven’t read the book or aren’t familiar with Moravec mightn’t understand where the title comes from, however this can allow them to consider the meaning behind it, especially because the title is revealed at the end of the film, as they will have all of the material available to determine their own meaning. 

[alicesmovingimage-blog]

Research

Moravec, Hans. 1988. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

I saw this book in a reference used in a previous piece of research (I believe it was the Graham article on the post/human), and I thought I’d check it out. For the most part, it echoes the thoughts of Kaku and Kurzweil, however the way Moravec sees the future of artificial intelligence seems a bit more relatable and personal in a sense.

“We humans will benefit for a time from their [the ‘mind children’] labours, but sooner or later, like natural children, they will seek their own fortune while we, their aged parents, silently fade away” (p.1).

I think that this provides a somewhat heartfelt bridge between the thoughts of Kurzweil and Graham, where the former speaks of the lengths artificial intelligence will take us (namely ‘kickstarting’ life in the rest of the universe), and the latter speaks of how human beings will be less biological and more mechanical and this will be the new normal for humanity, Moravec’s naming of artificial intelligence as ‘mind children’ certainly humanises the prospect. 

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

The Singularity - feat. Ray Kurzweil & Alex Jones [RAP NEWS 28]

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Many of Google’s famously computation driven projects—like the creation of Google Maps—employed literally thousands of people to supervise and correct the automatic systems. It is one of Google’s open secrets that they deploy human intelligence as a catalyst. Instead of programming in that last little bit of reliability, the final 1 or 0.1 or 0.01 percent, they can deploy a bit of cheap human brainpower. And over time, the humans work themselves out of jobs by teaching the machines how to act. “When the human says, ‘Here’s the right thing to do,’ that becomes something we can bake into the system and that will happen slightly less often in the future,” Teller said.

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/inside-googles-secret-drone-delivery-program/379306/

[grinderbot]

SDCC 2013 - Person of Interest Panel Part 4 (by dastiel)

Michael Emerson (3:25):

To me the most poignant thing that’s ever been on the show is that idea of the Machine being somehow… sentient. Independent. Pitiable. Orphaned. I thought: what a great notion that is. That we could have our… to have our heart strings tugged at by the plight of a disconnected, artificial intelligence.

Jonathan Nolan (4:42):

…it’s about artificial intelligence and the way in which we’re gonna interact with it. And the way in which it’ll slip into the world, unnoticed. Until… that it won’t.. it won’t sort of land with a giant thud, that it’ll creep in in ways that we didn’t anticipate. But the time you realize it’s here it will have already been sort of meshed into the fabric of our society and what we do that we’ll barely recognize it, we’ll barely understand what’s happened… if you think about Wikipedia as a form of artificial intelligence.. if you think about the Constitution as a piece of software.