Artificial Intelligence

     Last week we covered the topic of artificial intelligence in class, we talked about the “father” of AI, Alan Turing, and the Turing test he developed which evaluated if a machine was intelligent. I found this interesting because it got me thinking about what intelligence means. We talked about past machines such as Eliza and Sophia and although they were very advanced for their time, I don’t know if they were “intelligent” or just a very well-programmed machine. While in class I brought up a piece of news that I found fascinating, it was a new AI-powered research and study tool called Notebook LM that allows you to paste any information into a text box and it generates a very real podcast episode of the information given. Although this is also very advanced is this actually intelligence? 

    The class discussion made me ponder if AI is intelligent, this is a challenging thought because in some ways, yes, AI is intelligent but not in the same way humans are. Consciousness and emotions are a key part in my opinion that defines intelligence. It’s scary to think about what AI will advance to and what it will be able to do next, but I don’t think that it will a conscious or have emotions as humans do. Then again, in class we discussed the film Ex Machina, and this could be a possibility perhaps, in which AI learns to portray emotions and be self-aware. I think AI is an incredible thing we have created but I don’t know if we as humans really understand and if we will know when to stop. 

My Thoughts on The Machine is Us/ing us & Epic 2014

    I found the beginning of The Machine is Us/Ing Us very interesting, it starts off with someone writing text with a pencil and then it transitions to typing on a computer. It made me think of how flexible and how much easier it is to type text than writing on paper, it seems so normal to me that I never really thought about it before. It was fascinating to see the development of the web, how so rapidly everything changed and so many new websites were created. The video mentions how at the time this was released about 100 billion times humans were clicking on the web, I can’t even imagine how much this number has grown to this day. The Internet is such a crucial part of our lives that it is difficult to imagine our daily lives without it. Watching this video made me think of how different life was before the internet and how insane it must have been to suddenly be able to do so much more with the internet. 

     While watching the Epic 2014 video it took me a while to realize it was a bit of sci-fi. I really enjoyed this video and the storyline of the rivalry between Google and Microsoft, although it was not all true at the time it’s interesting how Epic sounds familiar to how the web is now and how we all contribute to it. It’s interesting how in the video The New York Times goes offline because I can’t imagine that ever happening. If anything I think most newspapers are going digital, these videos made me reflect on how some things have stayed the same but also see all the changes that have happened since then.