Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Knowing your own mind

There is a name that only needs to be spoken, to give me nightmares. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind is an endless potential for horrifying images connected to this name. It is as if the name is hyperlinked to every weakness in my armour, every shadow that ever crossed my mind.

If computers manage to become so personalised that they will store information like the human mind, is this what we will see? When we search a word, we will have it immediately linked to our curiosity, our delight or our nightmares? I hope not, the idea of being assisted by an artificial intelligence that knows my nightmares - or even worse, develops nightmares of its own - is not my vision of the bright cyber future.

2 comments:

Thomas said...

Have you seen "I, robot" in the cinemas? Well, if you haven't, you should - it gives an unique insight in the possible advantages and drawbacks of creating artificial intelligence.

Torill said...

I was thinking more of two books by Peter Hamilton. The first, Misspent youth is a BAD book by an otherwise able writer. One of the interestign features in this is however the background image of a world where storage space is endless and access very fast and very cheap. Here people have "personal assistants" with more than a touch of personality.

The second one, The Nano Flower features a woman constantly communicating with stored versions of her own self, splitting her "self" into four different maturity stages, and then devloping in different directions as each personality works on different tasks in the flesh world and online. She also takes advice from a stored version of her grandfather. This is the third of a series, and I haven't read the two earlier ones.