Artificial life

Computers and artificial agents become more and more sophisticated every year and more frequently involved in human’s everyday life. This increases the need to interact with them in a more natural way, similar to the way we interact with each other. Museum tour-guide robots (Nourbrakhsh, 1999) and robots that interact with the elderly (Montemerlo, 2002) demonstrate that we do not need robots just to interact with people, but also that there is a need for the interactions to be smooth and natural…

humans, and certain animals without as much as a second thought. Consciousnesses, within the context of neurophysiology can be referred to as “subjective awareness, though within the philosophical real, it is typically described as the subjective inner life. The concept of consciousness is essential in our personal views on the world and our society – the assumption that others possess the same internal workings is integral in human behaviors. This extends to the social justice system, central…

Kelly and Thompson: How High-technology Products Affect Humans Robots and artificial intelligence are the most rapidly developing high-technology products in recent years. These techniques have been and continue to be applied to an expansive range of problems that arise in medical diagnosis, e-commerce, mathematics, etc. However, how technology promotes our cognitive abilities―making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever before? Clive Thompson, a Brooklyn-based technology…

controversy on the topic of whether or not technology hinders today’s generation and the influences it has on our future. Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a future setting, prominent for its focus on "high tech and low life". Generally centered on a conflict among artificial intelligences or a mega corporation, cyberpunk does a great job of taking the technology resources we have now and heightening them but not too much to where it doesn’t seem tangible. The cyberpunk genre also…

From Google Home to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is developing rapidly every day. While science fiction in media has often portrayed AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons (Future of Life Institute, 2018). Is this constant development into the world of AI beneficial to humanity, or is it a pathway to the destruction of human labour and community? The purpose of this essay is…

in the field of artificial intelligence, developed ‘AlphaGo’. There was a centennial Go battle between the machine and ‘Se Dol Lee’, a renowned Go player. In the world of sophisticated mental games like Go, it was not expected that calculating machines could compete with humans who are capable of thinking creatively, even if they can process information at an astonishing speed. However, to our shock, AlphaGo won the battle by 4 to 1. This incident made us fear that the artificial intelligence…

Andrew Conforto English 101: GW Professor Mazzaferro 9/14/17 Paper 1 (Rough Draft): Life in the “Robotic Moment” Sherry Turkle’s “Selections from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” is a commentary on the changing view of AI, or artificial intelligence, in our progressing society. Turkle’s argument is one based in ethical and philosophical roots and challenges our current definition of what it means to be “alive”. This issue becomes more pressing the…

Virtual Reality is not (yet) about uploading your mind on a computer, as shown in great many movies. It is about getting your brain into believing, even for a quick moment, that it is somewhere else. According to NAE (2015), the user's brain should be convinced it has moved, although the environment around it doesn't change, because of the information given by all the senses, mainly sight, hearing, touch and motion sense. The engineering challenge here, is to virtually change the environment…

computer technology, focusing on mimicking human traits and patterns, it won’t be long until robots begin to replace us. Many people can say without hesitation that mass unemployment will erupt as companies resort to cheaper and more efficient artificial workers. People like Elon Musk describe how the only way for people to stay relevant is by getting upgraded themselves, adding mechanical aspects to enhance our skills. This second part doesn’t seem too bad, in fact its a sci-fi lovers dream…

stories that take part in this discussion are “For a Breath I Tarry”, by Roger Zelazny and “The Algorithms for Love” by Ken Liu. Both of these works explores what it means to be human through the sci-fi elements of machines and transformation of artificial intelligence. These stories offer different perspectives that examine the relationship between machines and humans and what it means to be human. In “For a Breath I Tarry”, Zelazny describes a futuristic world in which humans have become…