Larry Kilham Blog |
The biggest problem today is hearing the truth from politicians. How can they tell the truth? They need liberty to search for and to tell the truth. All their personal, family, group, and organization compromises restrain their ability to reveal the truth. A paradigm shift of our time is that nobody's mind is a mind by itself. Everyone's mind is connected to the computer clouds and to the collective intelligence of similar minds. This creates a super intelligence not anticipated in the slowly evolving mind scheme. However intelligent a dog or chimpanzee may be, their minds are still the essentially independent entities that they have always been, and the minds of prehistoric men were also essentially independent of some greater intelligence. Evolving DNA changed the design of the human brains, and some of the prebirth packaged intelligence in the human genome changed behavior, but these genetic changes have been and will be comparatively slow. We are finally understanding consciousness, imagination and self and how these relate to all other forms of intelligence with which they react. Especially due to massive low-cost computer clouds and nearly limitless communications networks connecting them and us, evolution has taken a fundamental step that will change the ecology of the earth. The brain that made man special over all the other creatures has created a network brain about whose magnitude and consequences we can only speculate. It's all in my book Megaminds: Creativity and Invention. Let us dispel the startling statements and popular movie themes telling us that artificial intelligence will greatly exceed human intelligence in just a few decades. There have been startling statements and popular movies telling us that artificial intelligence will greatly exceed human intelligence in just a few decades. There may be little doubt that this will be the case for applications mostly requiring massive and repetitive computing, but is not so certain for projects requiring significant imagination and creativity. In any case, it is highly unlikely that androids will be running around conquering the world.
AI Computers can access very large databases. They can be used in detailed multidimensional design. They can manage vast projects. There is talk of computer-like nanorobots that can circulate around in your body. There are even computer programs to invent new devices. However, as far as I am aware, no computer independently came up with the general theory of relativity. Timothy Lee summarized the AI and robots limitations nicely in his story in Vox. See the the story here. I write about this in detail in my new book,Winter of the Genomes available at Amazon. |