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Sunday’s Forum
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8 responses to “Sunday’s Forum”
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Does anyone see the parallels between the movie War Games ( Matthew Broderick) and the AI discussion.
For those who don’t remember the core story was what happens when the military fails to understand what a computer system is doing, in that case simply running simulations that the military was convinced were real.
The computer system was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, nothing “bad”, just misunderstood by humans.-
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The tension in the movie was between the military leaders that had the authority to launch, and the computer simulation that lead the military leaders to believe that a preemptive strike had actually been launched by the Soviets. The tension of course was the extremely short period that the US military had to react before multiple cities were destroyed.
At the core of this was the confidence assigned to the computer, while FORGETTING that the system was just running a series of simulations.
Bottom line: misunderstanding the output of the computer system’s output.
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It reminds me of a David Gerrold novel from the 70’s, When HARLIE was one.
SPOILER ALERT — Near the end of the book, the AI hacks into the bank records of a director of the company that created it, and sends the director materials suggesting the director committed illegal actions, in effect blackmailing the director to support keeping funding for the AI in the company’s budget.
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Does anyone see the parallels between the movie War Games ( Matthew Broderick) and the AI discussion.
For those who don’t remember the core story was what happens when the military fails to understand what a computer system is doing, in that case simply running simulations that the military was convinced were real.
The computer system was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, nothing “bad”, just misunderstood by humans. -
I recall reading a non-fiction book by Arthur C. Clarke, looking at WIKI, probably Profiles of the Future, 1962. He predicted there would be a limit to the size of computers. This would have been contemporary with the IBM 360, early transistor mainframes. Beyond a certain size they’d need enough power to run a city and a Niagara of cooling water. Development in integrated circuits made his prediction look silly.
But now we’re butting up against the same limit. Clarke had no idea it wasn’t really a limit, that the companies involved would hoover up all the capital in the world to build their data centers and expect the rest of us to happily provide local tax breaks and cheerfully pay the resulting higher power, water, and interest rates.
In the same book, Clarke noted the rise of FM radio. With the proliferation of stations, he predicted specialization for all interests. We’d have classical music, play-by-play chess, a gardening station, whatever. Who knew we’d end up with 8 current hit stations, 10 oldies and easy listening, 20 country, 6 holy roller, and 12 conservative talk.
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