The Singularity Blog Tour Mini Post #4

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Where does Creativity come from?
By Susan Kaye Quinn

Your mind? Conscious or Subconscious? Your Soul? (And is that a separate thing from your mind?) Are we just meat and electricity, random firings of neurons producing a seeming intelligence, like the million monkeys and a million typewriters eventually producing Shakespeare? Or is there a supernatural Muse that invades our bodies and creates art – in other words, are we just the conduit for something greater?

This is the “hard question of consciousness” – are we just the sum of our biology, our wet neural processes, or are we something more?

I love the idea that the coming of our Robot Overlords will force us to finally figure out what makes a person… a person. With consciousness and creativity and… a soul?

It’s the fundamental question that all those creative stories humankind has been fabricating for millenium have been trying to answer: what makes us human? In my Singularity series, I tackle this question head-on… including all the questions about mind, body, and soul that I think we’ll be struggling to answer in the very near future.

Shots of Awe is an amazing YouTube channel addressing all these questions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYbA_-mAtUY

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The Singularity Blog Tour Mini Post #3

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The Robots Are Coming… For Your Job
by Susan Kaye Quinn

The future isn’t just about terrifying Artificial Intelligence. What about the ordinary bot that’s smart enough to diagnose medical problems? Or take your order at McDonald’s? Or write an article for an online newspaper? THESE ALREADY EXIST. And the future will have smarter and smarter machines.

Just like self-driving cars, the bots don’t have to be Einstein. They just have to be a little bit better than human.

In my Singularity series, I imagine a future where humans have the chance to upgrade themselves—they inject nanites in their brains, become super-intelligenct, and stay ahead of the robots that way. Is that the only future we’ll have left for us? And will that option even appear before the robots take most of our jobs?

Are you a techno-optimist, believing that technology will always improve things overall? Or are you a techno-pessimist, believing that technology can be the unraveling of our way of life?

A look at our coming robot economy…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

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The Singularity Blog Tour Mini Post #2

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Not Your Mother’s Artificial Intelligence – AI IN THE MOVIES
By Susan Kaye Quinn

Terminator came out in 1984 – long before most of the tech that’s changed the world (the web, the iphone, the fact that I can stream all the movies I want from Amazon OMG). Today we have AI in our browsers and games, and scientists are actively building software and hardware that learns… just like humans. We’re long overdue for a re-imagining of how artificial intelligence will impact our world. Hollywood has started the job (TRANSCENDENCE, LUCY, AUTOMATA, CHAPPIE, EX MACHINA), but these are stumbling starts… I believe we’re just starting to tell the stories of AI in the future.

I can’t wait to see where Hollywood imagines our future to be… but science fiction writers are already busy trying to take a peek at that future. My Singularity series is one possible future – one where most of humanity has ascended into immortal human-machine hybrids, leaving the legacy humans behind, preserved like the rainforest. Is this our future? And even if it is… what are the steps that will happen in between?

What recent AI movies/novels/games have you seen that are RE-IMAGINING the AI of the future?

Donato Giancola - (Robot) Sorrow

http://www.donatoart.com/gallery/sorrow.html

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The Singularity Blog Tour Mini Post #1

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Would you upload your brain to the cloud?
by Susan Kaye Quinn

The tech is coming: already scientists are building AI software that learns and hardware that mimics the structure of the brain. But it’s no small job to create a mind… especially given we don’t really understand how our own mind/brains/souls work! But someday, the tech will be here.

And when that happens: would you be willing to “go digital” with your brain (or mind? Your essence? Your soul?)?

I think it will challenge everything we know about being human. And it’s one of the core questions I tackle in my Singularity Series (novels and short stories about the coming day when the capability for artificial intelligence has arrived).

What are your thoughts? When the day comes, would you upload your brain to the cloud?

Man/Machine/God

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/24206916723272776/

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