Artificial Intelligence is Better Than no Intelligence

I remember the moment I felt the rot had set in… or was it the great turning point? Or maybe just one of those things... whatever. I remember when it happened, because I rang a couple of people and said, “Mark this day well heathens, this is the turning point, or the great change, or one of those things.”

Gary Kasparov had conceded a win to Deep Blue. Some background for those who neither know nor care.

Gary Kasparov is a meat puppet and Deep Blue was a silicon based life form, and they played each other in chess.

For a long time, people who were nervous about being superseded by computers would console themselves with the defense of, “Oh well, they’ll never compete with our creativity. Take chess for example. It’s a game of computational type skill, but requires the human creativity of strategy.”

Gary (say it like Team America World Police, it’s more fun that way) was one of the most successful Grand Champions in chess at the time, and a box with some lights beat him. From memory the series wasn’t terribly decisive either way, but the point had been made. There was some double-dip irony going on here as well. Gary had been making a motza through the 80s and 90s putting his name to any old portable chess computer that wanted to carry his imprimatur.

Another rot moment: My dear mate Gooby told me recently that self replicating, self evolving strings of code get more complicated but then start to evolutionarily simplify over a course of a few thousand generations. (This happens quickly inside computers.) They have found that the short string children of the long string parents, have bits of code in them that appear to be junk. But take the junk out and the code doesn’t work… the human coders can’t determine why.

Now this sounds insanely like the genetic biologists who say, “Well genes are really long and complex, but there’s a lot of junk in there and we just don’t know what it’s doing.”

Super-predation and hyper-parasitism is going to ensure that the interweb is already crawling with things that are going to grow up to send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to kill my budgie. There probably is already an artificial intelligence lurking around out there, it’s just very hard to recognise. Let’s face it, people of different genders refuse to understand each other, imagine the alien brain of a different species. There are also days where I’m sure a couple of my colleagues would fail a Turing Test.

Mark my words heathens, it’s already happening to us, sort of, I mean I just lost my way around the St George Bank site again, and that sure feels like a plot.