When something doesn't exist (like artificial intelligence) it's easy to think that there is some missing piece of magic required to bring it in to existence. There has been a growing interest in movie depictions of AI of late, and these all seem to require some sort of non-linear step to realize this technology.
- Ex Machina (which I really enjoyed) required a new sort of hard/software in the form of a jelly like substance.
- Chappie (which I also liked, though I generally prefer cheese and ham combined in a sandwich) required 'terabytes of coding' and a good amount of luck to produce its AI.
- Age of Ultron (a film about one liners and explosions) required a magic jewel from Loki's staff no less to create its AI.
- Transcendence (Kurzweil summarized) gives up on AI and simply loads a human brain into the ether.
The message in all of these movies is - the reason we don't have AI is that we haven't taken some non-linear step.
The truth is that writing new code is itself a "non-linear step." People who don't write code may not understand that because all they see is a guy typing. Typing looks linear. Non-linearity is not the issue, though. The issue is we don't have an algorithm for strong AI.
To suggest that AI does not require a non-linear step is to imply that AI of the human-like kind already exists and simply needs more memory and processor speed to manifest in a satisfying form.
There are movies that imply or state that the AI is just a sophisticated program (Terminator, or 2001: A Space Odyssey), but these days maybe it doesn't seem credible that a programmer will simply code up an AI.
Posted by: james bach | May 06, 2015 at 12:18 AM