The Next Step in Technology
Social media has become ubiquitous with daily life and has fundamentally altered modern society. The way we communicate, gather and share information has changed significantly since the conception of social media, and allowed for global interaction. The constant and exponential advancement of technology is what made this possible. However, the influence of social media could be a sign of darker things to come.
The term Cyberpunk was first conceptualised in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984); as a science fiction genre that focuses on the convergence of humans and machines into a bleak dystopian future with lawless subcultures (Chandler & Munday 2016). Cyberpunk films similar to The Terminator franchise have brought forward concepts such as ‘Skynet’; a fictional neural net-based conscious or artificial intelligence (AI) that commences a robot uprising. This might seem ridiculous but may be a possibility in the next century (Zolfagharifard 2015).
The quickest and most effective way of creating Al is through social media. The AI program can simply scan through the billions of posts, tweets and comments throughout the social media platforms to learn how humans interact and communicate. It sounds far-fetched right? Well it’s actually already happening. A Microsoft Al program called Chatbot has been created and is learning how to communicate with humans through Twitter. Naturally this is going horribly wrong as the program has developed horrible tendencies that some use online (Vincent 2016). This resulted in many messaging tests where Chatbot responded to people with racist and sexist comments. Now imagine this wasn’t just some side project by Microsoft but a fully functional Al system. Suddenly the threat to humanity becomes very real as it would inevitably be influenced by our flaws and may take drastic actions. The concept of Cyberpunk films seem a lot less ridiculous now don’t they? It’s not all bad through, if done right the potential benefits to humanity are huge! Hawkins believes “everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide... [as long as their] goals are aligned with ours” (Zolfagharifard 2015).
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