Is Google making us stupid???

As I think back to class discussions throughout the semester, the topic about the Internet and Google is the most interesting to me, probably because I use the Internet so much. It is so easy to think that if you have a question about something: "just Google it". I've heard that phrase many times before. It is so convenient to go to the Google website and type in anthing. Immediately there are hundreds and hundreds of responses. But how reliable are the answers? Honestly, I never thought about this until this class. I just assumed what I was receiving was legitimate. Clearly, I was wrong and naive. Those responses are not always going to be valid. Finding accurate sources using a search engine is like a needle in a haystack. I've learned that is so important to look for true, valid sources because the results that pop up from a search engine have no depth. There is no hiearchy of information; all information is on one single level. So while Google provides quick and speedy information at our fingertips, I'm a little sketchy of its reliability.

What makes us human?

In most of the blogs there is a question that comes up in almost every argument. What does it take to be human? I think there are a lot of ways to look at this question. The first argument would be made for our d.n.a makeup. If that is it than our we the parts that make up our body?. Is it our cognitive ability? If that is the case then is it our brain that makes us human? Would someone who doesn't have these things be less human? Not to mention items of belief such as a spirit or soul. I believe that it isn't simple that's why these questions constantly come up. It is the combination of all these attributes that make us who we are. There can be things like us but we are so unique that nothing else can be human. Once we come to a clear understanding of what a human is it is easier to get a better perspective of other questions.

Koko

Watching the movie Koko today in class was very interesting and I found myself starting to rethink emotions that can be felt not just by humans. But after having the conversation about the emotions koko was feeling as being up to level with humans it still remains, that the emotions humans feel are different than that of animals or robots. We talked about how if a dog gets scolded or given a treat it either shys away because it got yelled at or it jumps around because it is excited over getting the treat. These emotions are instinct and happen in any animal whereas when humans feel emotions we feel and think deeply into our emotions. and those emotions can change. Yes it is remarkable that a gorilla can learn and have the ability to be as smart as a young child and this amazes me but it still is not the same level that humans are on when dealign with learning and handeling emotions.

Reflection of the class this semester.

I really enjoyed the class ethic and technology this semester with Dr. Langguth. We explored a lot of issues going on with technology today from the internet to robots. When I came into this class I didn't think my view on technology would change, but it did. I use to think that Google was the best thing that could of happened for a student because it would save people time by just looking up information on Google rather than going to the library and reading books to get more valid information. I learned from Nicholas Carr that Google is really hurting the intelligence of our society in the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? Also before I took this class I didn't know what device paradigm was or what focal practice meant. I thought that technology was great, but once I read Albert Borgmann novel Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life I began to notice that people are losing family traditions for example instead of sitting down at the table to eat dinner families order fast food and eat in seperate rooms watching television. I'm starting to see that in my own family and thats why I believe people should understand what device paradigm mean which is devices taking over focal practice and a focal practices consist of making fires, eating dinner at the table as a family, or making music. Those things are really being replaced by technology we see fake fire places in people bed rooms, people walk around downloading and listening to music on their ipods rather than make it themselves. Before I took this class I didnt believe that technology is hurting society, but now I realize it is. I also enjoyed talking about robots. I truely enjoyed my ethics and technology class this semester.

December 2, 2008

I found today's discussion in class very interesting. I think the episode in Boston Legal was indeed comparative to the idea of synthetic parts. I do not think that taking a drug is illegal if it helps a person study. To me, it is the same as coffee, if it is used as a means to stay up and focus. I think a drug should be illegal like in the case of steroids. Those help build muscle to make athletes stronger. To me, a medicine or coffee do not necessarily make a person smarter. It may just give them the capactiy to retain more knowledge. I do not believe that is cheating. It isnt as if the person has the answers to a test written on their hand. I personally have never used a medicine like Ritalin in order to do better on a test or say up late and focus for a test. I prefer to stick to coffee and sugar!!!!

Robot After Life

I wouldn't want to become a robot after life. I think it would just be harder to move on for others because if I lost someone important to me I would just want them gone so I could move on. It would just be strange to know that everything that person was is in front of me, but it really isn't them. The person that I love and the warmth they gave me died when they did and to have a figure to make up for it isn't going to help me move on, it would just make it worse.

Star Trek

While watching Star Trek the only thing that came to mind was that fact the Data was so life like. Which definitely made me rethink my views on the matter if robots will be be able to have rights. When a robot can think and have feeling in the way that Data did makes me consider him a life like as me. But I also think that it is going to awhile before there are such machines as Data walking around our world. And I also don't think we are ready for such machines around us. I think it will be years before we are comfortable for having machines walking around as one with humans.

bicentennial man

In class this week we read a story titled Bicentennial Man, I thought the story was very interesting because the robot in the story was very creative. The robot in that story was different from other robots because he was a free robot. I thought that was interesting because I thought if you were free you didnt have to obey orders coming from someone that didnt have authority. The robot obeyed the two young men who told him to take his cloths off. I didnt understand how could they consider a robot free even though he obeyed orders from teenagers.

Please Read for Tuesday

From last week's Guardian:




Will machines outsmart man?
Scientists believe the point of 'Singularity' – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of humans – is closer than we thought
Wendy M Grossman
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday November 5 2008 00.01 GMT
The Guardian, Thursday November 6 2008
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Ray Kurzweil at a conference — as a hologram. Photograph: Ed Murray/Corbis

They are looking for the hockey stick. Hockey sticks are the shape technology startups hope their sales graphs will assume: a modestly ascending blade, followed by a sudden turn to a near-vertical long handle. Those who assembled in San Jose in late October for the Singularity Summit are awaiting the point where machine intelligence surpasses that of humans and takes off near-vertically into recursive self-improvement.

The key, said Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the first reading machine and author of 2005's The Singularity Is Near, is exponential growth in computational power - "the law of accelerating returns". In his favourite example, at the human genome project's initial speed, sequencing the genome should have taken thousands of years, not the 15 scheduled. Seven years in, the genome was 1% sequenced. Exponential acceleration had the project finished on schedule. By analogy, enough doublings in processing power will close today's vast gap between machine and human intelligence.

This may be true. Or it may be an unfalsifiable matter of faith, which is why the singularity is sometimes satirically called "the Rapture for nerds". It makes assessing progress difficult. Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel, addressed a key issue at the summit: can Moore's law, which has the number of transistors packed on to a chip doubling every 18 months, stay in line with Kurzweil's graphs? The end has been predicted many times but, said Rattner, although particular chip technologies have reached their limits, a new paradigm has always continued the pace.

"In some sense - silicon gate CMOS - Moore's law ended last year," Rattner said. "One of the founding laws of accelerating returns ended. But there are a lot of smart people at Intel and they were able to reinvent the CMOS transistor using new materials." Intel is now looking beyond 2020 at photonics and quantum effects such as spin. "The arc of Moore's law brings the singularity ever closer."

Judgment day

Belief in an approaching singularity is not solely American. Peter Cochrane, the former head of BT's research labs, says for machines to outsmart humans it "depends on almost one factor alone - the number of networked sensors. Intelligence is more to do with sensory ability than memory and computing power." The internet, he adds, overtook the capacity of a single human brain in 2006. "I reckon we're looking at the 2020 timeframe for a significant machine intelligence to emerge." And, he said: "By 2030 it really should be game over."

Predictions like this flew at the summit. Imagine when a human-scale brain costs $1 - you could have a pocket full of them. The web will wake up, like Gaia. Nova Spivack, founder of EarthWeb and, more recently, Radar Networks (creator of Twine.com), quoted Freeman Dyson: "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."

Listening, you'd never guess that artificial intelligence has been about 20 years away for a long time now. John McCarthy, one of AI's fathers, thought when he convened the first conference on the subject in 1956, that they'd be able to wrap the whole thing up in six months. McCarthy calls the singularity, bluntly, "nonsense".

Even so, there are many current technologies, such as speech recognition, machine translation, and IBM's human-beating chess grandmaster Deep Blue, that would have seemed like AI at the beginning. "It's incredible how intelligent a human being in front of a connected computer is," observed the CNBC reporter Bob Pisani, marvelling at how clever Google makes him sound to viewers phoning in. Such advances are reminders that there may be valuable discoveries that make attempts at even the wildest ideas worthwhile.

Dharmendra Modha, head of the cognitive computing group at IBM's Almaden research lab, is leading a "quest" to "understand and build a brain as cheaply and quickly as possible". Last year, his group succeeded in simulating a rat-scale cortical model - 55m neurons, 442bn synapses - in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. The key, he says, is not the neurons but the synapses, the electrical-chemical-electrical connections between those neurons. Biological microcircuits are roughly essentially the same in all mammals. "An individual human being is stored in the strength of the synapses."

Smarter than smart

Modha doesn't suggest that the team has made a rat brain. "Philosophically," he writes on the subject, "any simulation is always an approximation (a kind of 'cartoon') based on certain assumptions. A biophysically realistic simulation is not the focus of our work." His team is using the simulation to try to understand the brain's high-level computational principles.

But computational power is nothing without software. "Would the neural code that powers human reasoning run on a different substrate?" the sceptical science writer John Horgan asked Kurzweil, who replied: "The key to the singularity is amplifying intelligence. The prediction is that an entity that passes the Turing test and has emotional intelligence ... will convince us that it's conscious. But that's not a philosophical demonstration."

For intelligence to be effective, it has to be able to change the physical world. The MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld was therefore at the summit to talk about programmable matter. It's a neat trick: computer science talks in ones and zeros, but these are abstractions representing the flow or interruption of electric current, a physical phenomenon. Gershenfeld, noting that maintaining that abstraction requires increasing amounts of power and complex programmning, wants to turn this on its head. What if, he asked, you could buy computing cells by the pound, coat them on a surface, and run programs that assemble them like proteins to solve problems?

Gershenfeld is always difficult for non-physicists to understand, and his video of cells sorting was no exception. Two things he said were clear. First: "We aim to create life." Second: "We have a 20-year road map to make the Star Trek replicator."

Twenty years: 2028. Vernor Vinge began talking about the singularity in the early 80s (naming it after the gravitational phenomenon around a black hole), and has always put the date at 2030. Kurzweil likes 2045; Rattner, before 2050.

Turning back time

These dates may be personally significant. Rattner is 59; Vinge is 64. Kurzweil is 60, takes 250 vitamins and other supplements a day, and believes some of them can turn back ageing. If curing all human ills will be a piece of cake for a superhuman intelligence, then the singularity carries with it the promise of immortality - as long as you're still alive when it happens.

It is in this connection between the singularity and immortality, along with the idea that sufficiently advanced technology can solve every problem from climate change to the exhaustion of oil reserves, that gives the summit the feel of a religious movement. Certainly, James Miller, assistant professor of economics at Smith College, sounded evangelical when he reviewed how best to prepare financially. He was optimistic, reviewing investment strategies and assuming retirement funds won't be needed.

HowStuffWorks founder Marshall Brain, by contrast, explained why 50 million people will lose their jobs when they can be replaced by robots. "In the whole universe, there is one intelligent species," he said. "We're in the process of creating the second intelligent species."

The anthropologist Jane Goodall may disagree. She sees a different kind of singularity - the growing ecological devastation of Africa - and worries about the disconnection between human minds and hearts. "If we're the most intellectual animal," she said, "why are we destroying our only home?"

If Goodall's singularity comes first, the other one might never happen at all - one of those catastrophes that Vinge admits as the only thing he can imagine that could stop it.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008