The Machine that is Us.

Indicator:The Evolving Machine

This news item made me think about machine "intelligence" seriously for the first time. I always dismissed the concept, believing the subtleties of human thought and emotion could never be programmed. I will now add the word "totally" to that belief. But partial and highly effective copies and extensions of ourselves in machines are now in existence. AI (Artificial Intelligence) is no longer science fiction. The part we probably cannot ever program is such a subtlety as a conscience. If we could, whose conscience, yours, mine, or the Pentagon's?

In the article I was persuaded that human decision making has already been taken over by a "machine", with the example quoted of market buy/sell decisions. Just another little thing to mull over - the real possibility of machines getting beyond us in a sense, making themselves, as they already are, indispensable. And making decisions that we simply are too slow to make, such as where do I fire that missile and who is the enemy! The deadly missile (a machine in itself) will be fired without any emotion. Chilly in here.