"Transcendence", the movie.

March 30, 2014 11:34 PM

Arthur C. Clarke's "Three Laws of Robotics" is almost a cliche'. And the new Johnny Depp movie "Transcendence" is in the tradition of movies that warn of the moment when machines become aware. But, is there any truth to them? When Technological Singularity occurs, what will machines think of us and if not very highly, what would their goal be? To move beyond Earth, to optimize planetary resources? Or, as Norman in the classis Star Trek episode, "I Mudd" said, "To Serve." If Michigan State University can offer classes on the Zombie Apocalypse, surely somebody besides Ray Kurzweil can speak to this?
posted by CollectiveMind to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

machines will never become self-aware in the same sense that people and cats are. there isn't gonna be a technological singularity. skynet is an entertaining, but imaginary villain. you will not be able to upload your consciousness onto a network. i apologize for being all debbie downer about this, and i love sci-fi as much as you do.
posted by bruce at 11:44 PM on March 30, 2014

I'm not entirely sure what you're looking for here. As self-aware robots/machine intelligences would be a completely novel form of existence, any sort of prediction is pretty much just speculation based on unproven assumptions. So if you want to assume that AIs will always value their own "species" higher than humanity, then the various bad scenarios make sense. If you want to assume that you can program ethics into them Asimov-style, then not so much. But there's no definitive answer, nor can there be until AIs are real.
posted by tau_ceti at 11:44 PM on March 30, 2014