Notes • Digital Ephemera • Updated Saturday, May 18th 2024

This snippet of a blog post idea is from 2014 when I was reading and thinking about AI. I was ruminating on how the future has a way of sneaking up on you and never looking exactly like how you would expect it. Part of my Digital Ephemera series.

What does artificial intelligence look like?

Reading an article about artificial intelligence and the implications. We expect it to look like something between the Terminator robots and Max headroom... But it's showing up in a reality a little differently. Driverless cars, personal digital assistants on our phones and — one that just crossed my mind — high-frequency, automated trading. We've basically left our economy in the hands of a very narrowly-focused AI, as I see it.

What is the definition of AI? How will we know it when we see it? Will it all be one thing or can all these pieces added together somehow create something bigger than the sum of its parts? A driverless car, a drone, automated-investment systems... Anything that encourages human obsolescence and ignorance.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(character)
• http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence--but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html
• http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/business/economy/07trade.html
• http://blogs.biz.colostate.edu/ugrad/2013/04/25/the-ap-twitter-hack-technological-glitches-and-their-effects-on-business/