Showing posts with label Berserkers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berserkers. Show all posts

Artificial Intelligence - How Does 'The Terminator' Represent AI?

 


The Terminator, which was released in 1984 and grossed nearly $40 million at the domestic box office and untold sums in the ancillary market while also spawning a multi-film franchise that continues to this day, is one of the most well-known representations of artificial intelligence in popular culture.



Despite the fact that the majority of the film takes place in 1984, it shows a future in which Skynet, a military-designed artificial intelligence system, becomes self-aware and wage war on mankind.

Shots from the future show roaming robot destroyers seeking humans on a battlefield littered with mechanical wreckage and human bones, who seem to be on the verge of extinction.



The majority of the movie is on a T-800 terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who is sent back to 1984 to murder Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she gives birth to John Connor, humanity's future savior.

The fundamental story element of The Terminator dramatizes what is likely the most prominent artificial intelligence myth in popular culture: depicting intelligent machines as inherently dangerous beings capable of rebelling against mankind in pursuit of their own agenda.



To fully comprehend the relevance of The Terminator, further information regarding the story as well as the character of the terminator must be provided.

Earth is in the middle of a conflict between humans and Skynet-created robots in the year 2029, after a nuclear catastrophe.

Despite the fact that more information about Sky net is disclosed in later installments of the series, its functionality remains a mystery in the first film.

On the verge of defeat, John Connor (who is barely mentioned in passing in the movie) leads a human resistance force that eventually overcomes the robots.

The machines build a time-travel device to send one of their terminator units back in time to assassinate Sarah Connor before she conceives her savior son in order to foil the Connor-led revolt.

To thwart the robots' plot, the human resistance sends back their own operative, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn).

Reese is supposed to protect Sarah Connor while the terminator is supposed to murder her.

As a result, the rest of the film, set in 1984, resembles a cat and mouse pursuit in which the terminator tracks down Connor and Reese only to escape by the skin of their teeth.




The Terminator is scorched to its mechanical endoskeleton in the film's climax, and it follows Connor and Reese into a factory.

Reese conducts a self-sacrifice by putting a homemade pipe bomb in the terminator's belly, killing him and severing the terminator in two.

Connor is pursued by the terminator's torso, which she is able to smash using a hydraulic press.

The video then cuts to a pregnant Sarah Connor travelling across Mexico some months later.

Reese is revealed to be John Connor's father in this scene.

The Terminator is a wonderful example of artificial intelligence.

It can walk, speak, sense, and act like a human person, while being a programmed murdering machine.



It has been shown that it can absorb interactional subtlety and change its behavior depending on previous experiences and interactions.

In a phone conversation, the terminator can also simulate the voice of Sarah Connor's mother, which convinces Sarah to divulge her whereabouts to the terminator.

The terminator can unquestionably pass the Turing Test in these areas (a test wherein a confederate is unable to determine if they are communicating with a human or a robot).



The terminator, on the other hand, is devoid of human awareness and is guided by mechanical logic as it completes a task.

The terminator was shot, ran over by a Mac truck, and burnt to its endoskeleton, among other traumas, thus it's safe to assume it doesn't perceive pain like humans do.

Popular culture's pessimistic depictions of artificial intelligence, such as The Terminator, give images of the future to be avoided.



As a result, The Terminator serves as a stark warning against a fundamental driving reason behind artificial intelligence development—the military industrial complex—with its depiction of a future governed by robots and its deployment of a ruthless, unstoppable killing machine (later installments made the additional link of corporate greed).


President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (later derisively nicknamed the Star Wars Initiative by Senator Ted Kennedy) unveiled in 1983 ratcheted up tensions with the Soviet Union at the time of the film's development.


In a nutshell, the Strategic Defensive Initiative was a planned missile defense system that would protect the nation against ballistic nuclear weapons assaults.

It was believed that Reagan's bluster might spark a nuclear weapons race.

As a result, The Terminator may be viewed as a criticism of Ronald Reagan's Cold War strategy in that it offers a look into a possible post-apocalyptic future wrought by nuclear catastrophe and the development of ever powerful weapons.

In summary, the film expresses concerns about human creation's destructive potential and the possibility for humans' own inventions to turn against them.



~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 

Berserkers; de Garis, Hugo; Technological Singularity.


References And Further Reading

Brammer, Rebekah. 2018. “Welcome to the Machine: Artificial Intelligence on Screen.” Screen Education 90 (September): 38–45.

Brown, Richard, and Kevin S. Decker, eds. 2009. Terminator and Philosophy: I’ll Be Back, Therefore I Am. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

Gramantieri, Riccardo. 2018. “Artificial Monsters: From Cyborg to Artificial Intelligence.” In Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable: The Cultural Links between the Human and Inhuman, edited by Lisa Wegner Bro, Crystal O’Leary-Davidson, and Mary Ann Gareis, 287–313. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Jancovich, Mark. 1992. “Modernity and Subjectivity in The Terminator: The Machine as Monster in Contemporary American Culture.” Velvet Light Trap 30 (Fall): 3–17.



AI - What Is Superintelligence AI? Is Artificial Superintelligence Possible?

 


 

In its most common use, the phrase "superintelligence" refers to any degree of intelligence that at least equals, if not always exceeds, human intellect, in a broad sense.


Though computer intelligence has long outperformed natural human cognitive capacity in specific tasks—for example, a calculator's ability to swiftly interpret algorithms—these are not often considered examples of superintelligence in the strict sense due to their limited functional range.


In this sense, superintelligence would necessitate, in addition to artificial mastery of specific theoretical tasks, some kind of additional mastery of what has traditionally been referred to as practical intelligence: a generalized sense of how to subsume particulars into universal categories that are in some way worthwhile.


To this day, no such generalized superintelligence has manifested, and hence all discussions of superintelligence remain speculative to some degree.


Whereas traditional theories of superintelligence have been limited to theoretical metaphysics and theology, recent advancements in computer science and biotechnology have opened up the prospect of superintelligence being materialized.

Although the timing of such evolution is hotly discussed, a rising body of evidence implies that material superintelligence is both possible and likely.


If this hypothesis is proved right, it will very certainly be the result of advances in one of two major areas of AI research


  1. Bioengineering 
  2. Computer science





The former involves efforts to not only map out and manipulate the human DNA, but also to exactly copy the human brain electronically through full brain emulation, also known as mind uploading.


The first of these bioengineering efforts is not new, with eugenics programs reaching back to the seventeenth century at the very least.

Despite the major ethical and legal issues that always emerge as a result of such efforts, the discovery of DNA in the twentieth century, together with advances in genome mapping, has rekindled interest in eugenics.

Much of this study is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the human brain's genetic composition in order to manipulate DNA code in the direction of superhuman intelligence.



Uploading is a somewhat different, but still biologically based, approach to superintelligence that aims to map out neural networks in order to successfully transfer human intelligence onto computer interfaces.


  • The brains of insects and tiny animals are micro-dissected and then scanned for thorough computer analysis in this relatively new area of study.
  • The underlying premise of whole brain emulation is that if the brain's structure is better known and mapped, it may be able to copy it with or without organic brain tissue.



Despite the fast growth of both genetic mapping and whole brain emulation, both techniques have significant limits, making it less likely that any of these biological approaches will be the first to attain superintelligence.





The genetic alteration of the human genome, for example, is constrained by generational constraints.

Even if it were now feasible to artificially boost cognitive functioning by modifying the DNA of a human embryo (which is still a long way off), it would take an entire generation for the changed embryo to evolve into a fully fledged, superintelligent human person.

This would also imply that there are no legal or moral barriers to manipulating the human DNA, which is far from the fact.

Even the comparatively minor genetic manipulation of human embryos carried done by a Chinese physician as recently as November 2018 sparked international outrage (Ramzy and Wee 2019).



Whole brain emulation, on the other hand, is still a long way off, owing to biotechnology's limits.


Given the current medical technology, the extreme levels of accuracy necessary at every step of the uploading process are impossible to achieve.

Science and technology currently lack the capacity to dissect and scan human brain tissue with sufficient precision to produce full brain simulation results.

Furthermore, even if such first steps are feasible, researchers would face significant challenges in analyzing and digitally replicating the human brain using cutting-edge computer technology.




Many analysts believe that such constraints will be overcome, although the timeline for such realizations is unknown.



Apart from biotechnology, the area of AI, which is strictly defined as any type of nonorganic (particularly computer-based) intelligence, is the second major path to superintelligence.

Of course, the work of creating a superintelligent AI from the ground up is complicated by a number of elements, not all of which are purely logistical in nature, such as processing speed, hardware/software design, finance, and so on.

In addition to such practical challenges, there is a significant philosophical issue: human programmers are unable to know, and so cannot program, that which is superior to their own intelligence.





Much contemporary research on computer learning and interest in the notion of a seed AI is motivated in part by this worry.


Any machine capable of changing reactions to stimuli based on an examination of how well it performs in relation to a predetermined objective is defined as the latter.

Importantly, the concept of a seed AI entails not only the capacity to change its replies by extending its base of content knowledge (stored information), but also the ability to change the structure of its programming to better fit a specific job (Bostrom 2017, 29).

Indeed, it is this latter capability that would give a seed AI what Nick Bostrom refers to as "recursive self-improvement," or the ability to evolve iteratively (Bostrom 2017, 29).

This would eliminate the requirement for programmers to have an a priori vision of super intelligence since the seed AI would constantly enhance its own programming, with each more intelligent iteration writing a superior version of itself (beyond the human level).

Such a machine would undoubtedly cast doubt on the conventional philosophical assumption that robots are incapable of self-awareness.

This perspective's proponents may be traced all the way back to Descartes, but they also include more current thinkers like John Haugeland and John Searle.



Machine intelligence, in this perspective, is defined as the successful correlation of inputs with outputs according to a predefined program.




As a result, robots differ from humans in type, the latter being characterized only by conscious self-awareness.

Humans are supposed to comprehend the activities they execute, but robots are thought to carry out functions mindlessly—that is, without knowing how they work.

Should it be able to construct a successful seed AI, this core idea would be forced to be challenged.

The seed AI would demonstrate a level of self-awareness and autonomy not readily explained by the Cartesian philosophical paradigm by upgrading its own programming in ways that surprise and defy the forecasts of its human programmers.

Indeed, although it is still speculative (for the time being), the increasingly possible result of superintelligent AI poses a slew of moral and legal dilemmas that have sparked a lot of philosophical discussion in this subject.

The main worries are about the human species' security in the case of what Bostrom refers to as a "intelligence explosion"—that is, the creation of a seed AI followed by a possibly exponential growth in intellect (Bostrom 2017).



One of the key problems is the inherently unexpected character of such a result.


Humans will not be able to totally foresee how superintelligent AI would act due to the autonomy entailed by superintelligence in a definitional sense.

Even in the few cases of specialized superintelligence that humans have been able to construct and study so far—for example, robots that have surpassed humans in strategic games like chess and Go—human forecasts for AI have shown to be very unreliable.

For many critics, such unpredictability is a significant indicator that, should more generic types of superintelligent AI emerge, humans would swiftly lose their capacity to manage them (Kissinger 2018).





Of all, such a loss of control does not automatically imply an adversarial relationship between humans and superintelligence.


Indeed, although most of the literature on superintelligence portrays this relationship as adversarial, some new work claims that this perspective reveals a prejudice against machines that is particularly prevalent in Western cultures (Knight 2014).

Nonetheless, there are compelling grounds to believe that superintelligent AI would at the very least consider human goals as incompatible with their own, and may even regard humans as existential dangers.

For example, computer scientist Steve Omohundro has claimed that even a relatively basic kind of superintelligent AI like a chess bot would have motive to want the extinction of humanity as a whole—and may be able to build the tools to do it (Omohundro 2014).

Similarly, Bostrom has claimed that a superintelligence explosion would most certainly result in, if not the extinction of the human race, then at the very least a gloomy future (Bostrom 2017).

Whatever the benefits of such theories, the great uncertainty entailed by superintelligence is obvious.

If there is one point of agreement in this large and diverse literature, it is that if AI research is to continue, the global community must take great care to protect its interests.





Hardened determinists who claim that technological advancement is so tightly connected to inflexible market forces that it is simply impossible to change its pace or direction in any major manner may find this statement contentious.


According to this determinist viewpoint, if AI can deliver cost-cutting solutions for industry and commerce (as it has already started to do), its growth will proceed into the realm of superintelligence, regardless of any unexpected negative repercussions.

Many skeptics argue that growing societal awareness of the potential risks of AI, as well as thorough political monitoring of its development, are necessary counterpoints to such viewpoints.


Bostrom highlights various examples of effective worldwide cooperation in science and technology as crucial precedents that challenge the determinist approach, including CERN, the Human Genome Project, and the International Space Station (Bostrom 2017, 253).

To this, one may add examples from the worldwide environmental movement, which began in the 1960s and 1970s and has imposed significant restrictions on pollution committed in the name of uncontrolled capitalism (Feenberg 2006).



Given the speculative nature of superintelligence research, it is hard to predict what the future holds.

However, if superintelligence poses an existential danger to human existence, caution would dictate that a worldwide collaborative strategy rather than a free market approach to AI be used.



~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 


Berserkers; Bostrom, Nick; de Garis, Hugo; General and Narrow AI; Goertzel, Ben; Kurzweil, Ray; Moravec, Hans; Musk, Elon; Technological Singularity; Yudkowsky, Eliezer.



References & Further Reading:


  • Bostrom, Nick. 2017. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  • Feenberg, Andrew. 2006. “Environmentalism and the Politics of Technology.” In Questioning Technology, 45–73. New York: Routledge.
  • Kissinger, Henry. 2018. “How the Enlightenment Ends.” The Atlantic, June 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/henry-kissinger-ai-could-mean-the-end-of-human-history/559124/.
  • Knight, Heather. 2014. How Humans Respond to Robots: Building Public Policy Through Good Design. Washington, DC: The Project on Civilian Robotics. Brookings Institution.
  • Omohundro, Steve. 2014. “Autonomous Technology and the Greater Human Good.” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 26, no. 3: 303–15.
  • Ramzy, Austin, and Sui-Lee Wee. 2019. “Scientist Who Edited Babies’ Genes Is Likely to Face Charges in China.” The New York Times, January 21, 2019



Artificial Intelligence - What Are AI Berserkers?

 


Berserkers are intelligent killing robots initially described by science fiction and fantasy novelist Fred Saberhagen (1930–2007) in his 1962 short tale "Without a Thought." Berserkers later emerged as frequent antagonists in many more of Saberhagen's books and novellas.

Berserkers are a sentient, self-replicating race of space-faring robots with the mission of annihilating all life.

They were built as an ultimate doomsday weapon in a long-forgotten interplanetary conflict between two extraterrestrial cultures (i.e., one intended as a threat or deterrent more than actual use).

The facts of how the Berserkers were released are lost to time, since they seem to have killed off their creators as well as their foes and have been ravaging the Milky Way galaxy ever since.

They come in a variety of sizes, from human-scale units to heavily armored planetoids (cf.

Death Star), and are equipped with a variety of weaponry capable of sterilizing worlds.

Any sentient species that fights back, such as humans, is a priority for the Berserkers.

They construct factories in order to duplicate and better themselves, but their basic objective of removing life remains unchanged.

It's uncertain how far they evolve; some individual units end up questioning or even changing their intentions, while others gain strategic brilliance (e.g., Brother Assassin, "Mr.Jester," Rogue Berserker, Shiva in Steel).

While the Berserkers' ultimate purpose of annihilating all life is evident, their tactical activities are uncertain owing to unpredictability in their cores caused by radioactive decay.

Their name is derived from Norse mythology's Berserkers, powerful human warriors who battled in a fury.

Berserkers depict a worst-case scenario for artificial intelligence: murdering robots that think, learn, and reproduce in a wild and emotionless manner.

They demonstrate the deadly arrogance of providing AI with strong weapons, harmful purpose, and unrestrained self-replication in order to transcend its creators' comprehension and control.

If Berserkers are ever developed and released, they may represent an inexhaustible danger to living creatures over enormous swaths of space and time.

They're quite hard to get rid of after they've been unbottled.

This is owing to their superior defenses and weaponry, as well as their widespread distribution, ability to repair and multiply, autonomous functioning (i.e., without centralized control), capacity to learn and adapt, and limitless patience to lay in wait.

The discovery of Berserkers is so horrifying in Saberhagen's books that human civilizations are terrified of constructing their own AI for fear that it may turn against its creators.

Some astute humans, on the other hand, find a fascinating Berserker counter-weapon: Qwib-Qwibs, self-replicating robots designed to eliminate all Berserkers rather than all life ("Itself Surprised" by Roger Zelazny).

Humans have also utilized cyborgs as an anti-Berserker technique, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes biological intelligence (Berserker Man, Ber serker Prime, Berserker Kill).

Berserkers also exemplifies artificial intelligence's potential for inscrutability and strangeness.

Even while Berserkers can communicate with each other, their huge brains are generally unintelligible to sentient organic lifeforms fleeing or battling them, and they are difficult to study owing to their proclivity to self-destruct if caught.

What can be deduced from their reasoning is that they see life as a plague, a material illness that must be eradicated.

In consequence, the Berserkers lack a thorough understanding of biological intellect and have never been able to adequately duplicate organic life, despite several tries.

They do, however, sometimes enlist human defectors (dubbed "goodlife") to aid the Berserkers in their struggle against "badlife" (i.e., any life that resists extermination).

Nonetheless, Berserkers and humans think in almost irreconcilable ways, hindering attempts to reach a common understanding between life and nonlife.

The seeming contrasts between human and machine intellect are at the heart of most of the conflict in the tales (e.g., artistic appreciation, empathy for animals, a sense of humor, a tendency to make mistakes, the use of acronyms for mnemonics, and even fake encyclopedia entries made to detect pla giarism).

Berserkers have been known to be defeated by non-intelligent living forms such as plants and mantis shrimp ("Pressure" and "Smasher").

Berserkers may be seen of as a specific example of the von Neumann probe, which was invented by mathematician and physicist John von Neumann (1903–1957): self-replicating space-faring robots that might be deployed over the galaxy to efficiently investigate it In the Berserker tales, the Turing Test, developed by mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing (1912–1954), is both investigated and upended.

In "Inhuman Error," human castaways compete with a Berserker to persuade a rescue crew that they are human, while in "Without a Thought," a Berserker tries to figure out whether its game opponent is human.

The Fermi paradox—the concept that if intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations exist, we should have heard from them by now—is also explained by Berserkers.

It's possible that extraterrestrial civilizations haven't contacted Earth because they were destroyed by Berserker-like robots or are hiding from them.

Berserkers, or anything like them, have featured in a number of science fiction books in addition to Saberhagen's (e.g., works by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Ann Leckie, and Martha Wells; the Terminator series of movies; and the Mass Effect series of video games).

All of these instances demonstrate how the potential for existential risks posed by AI may be investigated in the lab of fiction.


~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 

de Garis, Hugo; Superintelligence; The Terminator.


Further Reading


Saberhagen, Fred. 2015a. Berserkers: The Early Tales. Albuquerque: JSS Literary Productions.

Saberhagen, Fred. 2015b. Berserkers: The Later Tales. Albuquerque: JSS Literary Productions.

Saberhagen’s Worlds of SF and Fantasy. http://www.berserker.com.

The TAJ: Official Fan site of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker® Universe. http://www.berserkerfan.org.




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