writer and director of Ex Machina.^5 To this author, Ava becomes a “girl”
when we recognize that she has emotions and motives—perhaps most
when those human impulses become dangerous.
Robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are frightening when they
threaten our dominance and sense of control, particularly when that
jurisdiction seems capable of being permanently lost with the “rise of
machines.” But for most of us, the concept of AI is mysterious. Because I
cannot write a single line of computer programming code, I am incapable
of understanding how the AI is configured and becomes dangerous, but to
those who understand and create AI, its future is a certainty.
In some ways, AI is happening all around us—it’s not an isolated
software program being crafted in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Don’t limit
your thinking of AI to a computer being smartly programmed to play
chess (a very specific type of AI), but consider the future of AI as
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), wherein machines will be able to
learn, think, and (arguably) have a conscience.
The development of AGI is more important to the cyborg future of man
than any implant invention, but there are surprising roadblocks along the
way. For instance, a small child can easily discern the difference between a
cat and a dog, but computers struggle with this comparison. Computer
scientists, therefore, are delving deeply into the way our minds learn and
process, expecting that a day will soon come when a collection of
computers will finally be able to learn and outfox their programmers. The
day this occurs, AGI will become unstoppable.
Today, the elaboration of AGI occurs in real time, all around us. “A
company is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines ...
there is this collective AI in Google search, where we are all sort of
plugged in like nodes in a network, like leaves on a tree. We are all feeding
the network with our questions and our search. We are all collectively
programming the AI. And Google (and Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
and the social networks), plus all the humans connected to it are all one
giant cybernetic collective,” claims Elon Musk.^6 The feedback loop
reinforces the machines’ capabilities, and potentiates all other machines’
ability to process information. Remembering is easy—computers run laps
around us at the speed of light—but cybernetic cogitation will make us
ridiculously superhuman.