Daisy, Daisy
“Uh, tell Jon I’m running late!” “Here’s your message to Jon, are you ready to send it?” “Yeah, that’s perfect. Also, I have to meet Sarah at 5 pm tomorrow and again the week after. “Okay, I’ve scheduled your meeting, note that you have another meeting that overlaps. Do you want me to schedule it anyways?” “Oh, shit, move dinner with Joshua to 6:30.” “Watch your language, Blake… I’ve moved dinner with Joshua to 6:30 pm.” “Thank you, Siri.” “Your wish is my command.”
On Monday, October 24th, John McCarthy, the father of Artificial Intelligence, died. McCarthy coined AI, in 1956, as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” At this point, his idea was purely skeptical; nonetheless, science and fear-inspired science fiction split apart to create distinct public impressions of conscious machines. In a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing proposed the question, “Can machines think?” He answered the quintessential question by developing a test in which a human blindly interacts with two users—one human, one computer—and has to determine which has real intelligence. If a machine can convince a human it’s genuine, then it is intelligent.
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick portrayed humanity’s impending irrelevance in the cult classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL 9000, the onboard computer of Discovery One, a ship running an interplanetary mission to Jupiter, makes the decision to terminate all humans aboard to preserve the integrity of the mission—homicidal justice for the betterment of a cause.
These impressions combined and technology began to terrify people. While computer manufactures were striving to develop technology to aid and benefit human life, the populace saw cruel, dark, electric machines with the intent to replace humans. It seemed we were doomed to become inconsequential automatons subject to computational will.
