AI

Sometimes the world tells you things. You just need to pay attention and figure out what you’re being told.

This is not the paranoid schizophrenic line: “the voices on TV, they’re actually talking to me!” This is the observation that in the sea of stimulus I receive, some patterns jump out at me. One possibility is that this is nothing more than my subconscious writ large. Selection bias working such that I notice what’s already on my mind. I’m willing to accept that, because from my point of view, the whole world conspires to let me understand what I’m thinking about. It’s a cool system.

This month, I’m thinking about when we’re going to see the first nonhuman intelligence. The first AI. I’m reading The Singularity is Near by Kurzweil. I’m also watching my way through Galactica, in which machines try to kill us all. Yesterday, capital_l pointed me to this note which alludes to the idea that Google’s media project (in which they’re scanning the contents of several libraries) is not intended for a human to read, but for an AI. It raised the question of where we are most likely to encounter the first machine intelligences.

So, where are our machine overlords going to come from? Here’s my list of guesses:

* Google / The Internet
* Secret government project
* Computer games