Is The Terrifying Ghost Actually In The Machine?
Machines are teaching themselves stuff we couldn’t even come up with. What are we so scared of, though?
Science fiction has often dealt with the idea of the singularity: an imagined future in which technological advances completely disrupt the world as we know it. This usually happens when artificial intelligence becomes self-aware, at which point there is no return to humans making technology, at which point there is only technology making humans.
I just read two very different articles in two very different publications that weren’t supposed to have anything in common, and yet both touched on artificial intelligence — a sign of the times?
The first article explained how artificial intelligence is affecting computer programming; basically, it related how code is being taught code so that coders don’t have to busy themselves with the minutiae of spelling things out in computer-speak for computers to do as told, but instead focus on coming up with ideas that the computer will eventually learn to understand and code itself. Imagine a future in which we tell a programme to please build a website that does all these things and looks this way, and just wait for the code to write itself.