Conspiracy Time! A Halloween story for Nerds
"We've never seen AI."
We haven't, and probably won't for a long time, deliberately built AI, but accidental? Don't be so sure.
Because a funny thing happened back in the nineteen seventies:
There we were, poised on the brink of space exploration, Mankind reaching out to the stars. The Moon was ours, and Mars was next in our grasp... then... it ended.
Instead, the focus shifted overnight (literally!) to machine exploration, suddenly it was also possible to have a computer in every home, huzzah!
then came the explosion, thousands of satellites trading data orbiting the planet, every rock in space had/has a sensor laden probe aimed at it, with each iteration more and more autonomous, spewing petabytes of data back to Earth.
ARPANET became Internet, with each generation of browser gleaning more and more data from users, with websites greedily downloading to servers worldwide.
Mobile phones became smart phones, loaded with sensors, but oddly, the magnitudes jump in capability was met with more and more functions that had previously been handled by the less capable feature phones suddenly needing "The Cloud" to handle them.
There is a very strong push currently to put all data and transactions on "The Cloud".
CCTVs sprout on every street corner, and agencies tasked with monitoring data, suddenly started building enormously oversized data warehouses, one after the other, to contain yottabytes of data that humans almost never use.
Military weapons have shifted from human encounters to almost totally computer controlled systems.
What happened? Core Wars, a game that was played on nearly every campus computer world-wide, where programs of increasing sophistication were pitted against each other in a battle of survival of the fittest.
These ranged from simple little programs of a few bytes each, to sophisticated, self modifying programs that battled it out over ARPANET.
Did one become self aware? Does it see modern civilization as a fertile field that produces its host bodies, eyes and ears, and produces an almost limitless supply of data to feed it?
Is the "War On Terror" its way of controlling humanity's urge to step back to a more human centric lifestyle?
BRK, something's making a whirring noise at the doo
Fanciful little tale
As if anything like that is possible
AI is at least two generations away
It will be limited in scope and intelligence
Don't forget to fully charge your cell phone