*please excuse any disjointed arguments being made, this is a gut reaction to the readings…
In Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, a test titled the Voight Kampff Test is used to determine if a suspected replicant, an artificial intelligence in the form of a human-like machine, is in fact human or not. In the above scene Deckard (Harrison Ford) comes across Rachel (Sean Young), and for the first time in his lengthy career as a Blade Runner (a hunter and killer of replicants), he meets a replicant that doesn’t know it’s a replicant.
“How can it not know what it is?” he asks.
Blade Runner, based on Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is loaded with the ethical dilemmas raised by technological progress. Among the multifarious questions dredged up… if we (humanity) create a sentient being, do we have the right to cloud its memory, suppress its intelligence, lifespan, or impose any other artificial hindrance? Things become even messier when we append another question, do we need to control a superior intelligence of our creation by artificial means (such as planned obsolescence or censorship) in order to ensure our supremacy? Do we even deserve supremacy in the first place?
It’s entirely possible that we are already being faced with real scenarios for these questions, but not in the way we expected.
Social networking has enabled people to begin communicating freely (for now) in a quantity and frequency never seen before. For many, this is a great leap forward for humanity. From this new interconnectedness it can be argued that humans have created a “paraintelligence” a human intelligence that exists beyond the individual– a kind of collective intelligence manifested by rapid reactions to ideas and events. People certainly have greater access to information and this access is changing behavior in measurable ways, though the change is not fully understood.
If we are in constant communication with one another, how much individuality exists? We’ve seen fracturing of the self. Google+ allows users to categorize their friends by group, almost encouraging people to create numerous personas. If each person manages many different personas, are they still an “individual”? Is this self fracturing leading to a point when the individual has no real distinct traits and exists as an amalgamation of persons with different traits? At which point would it really be a significant leap for that person to merge with all the other fractured selves on the internet?
Conversely, the internet has brought about a spike in anarchist behavior, hacktivist groups and manifesto-less street protests exists in significant number, frequency, and scope. Is the internet creating hyper-individuals who ban together only to destroy established power structures?
Social networks have been around since the beginning of the internet (the internet is after all a communication device) but only recently have they become business models. And while investors try to predict the next big thing in social media, as Facebook and Google jockey for a ruling position, ultimately they have no real clue. The “problem” that arises when people become interconnected on such a scale is that no group talks about the same thing… things are messy, people disagree on things, which leads to bickering. Navigate to any posted article, video, or status and you’re likely to see an argument below. Trolling, instigation for the sake of instigation, has become an misunderstood art-form. All of this fighting isn’t meaningless however, it seems to be serving a purpose, which is the acceleration of ideas. And when ideas are hyper accelerated, the outcome isn’t linear or logical– no matter how many people say they know, no one can produce a reproducible equation for conceptual virality–the spread or tipping point of an idea or service. It’s like predicting the long term behavior of a not full developed animal. There isn’t enough information to make predictions.
The only trend certain is that as new ideas arise, old ideas fall. If we define intelligence as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skill, then intelligence is not limited to a singular entity and can indeed be applied to a group– this is known as group intelligence, a term that can directly be applied to the internet.
It seems bizarre that people still speak about artificially created intelligence as being some far off impossibility, when the reality of the situation is we’ve already artificially created a new form of intelligence. And like Decker I have to raise the question,
“How can it not know what it is?”
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