Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Jono Bacon present a new minimal-Langridge-involved Bad Voltage, in which we discuss:
"Her", the new Spike Jonze movie, has a man falling in love with a computer AI. Will AIs ever actually be our friends? What is love* and are computers capable of it? And will the Singularity happen?
Brendan Eich has been appointed as CEO of Mozilla, and has in the past donated money to oppose gay marriage in California. Can a CEO's personal life and work life be separated? Was the appointment a mistake by the Mozilla Corporation?
We interview Zohar Babin from Kaltura, an open-source-based video company about what they do and how open source fits in
What's going on in the Bad Voltage community? Gaming Saturday on March 29th, Jono brags about having got a prediction right for the first time in his life, and Bryan still doesn't know who Penelope Pitstop is
Whenever I think of movies and computer AI I always think of Electric Dreams where a computer inadvertently gets emotions in a Cyrano de Bergerac remake.
Maybe it was just the 80âs and I was very impressionable.
All Iâm going to say for the software girlfriend, welcome to LovePlus in a documentary a person had a child and a wife and still âdatedâ a girl that only exists on a 3ds, there are hotels specifically for this game where you can put her in your reality and to the people who have this âgameâ really feel like they are dating and that they are teenagers again!
I sometimes wonder what would happen if Brendan Eich went and tried to get rid of marraige between a man and a woman and how much louder the objections would be. Is it really discriminatory if a person does not want any marriage?
I agree 100% with @jonobacon. Brendan Eich should be able to express his personal views without it messing with his job. Keep personal issues out of the work space.
I think people should be judged by their political views. I try to ignore it with actors and musicians etc because it shouldnât really effect my enjoyment of their work but with others it can make you question their decisions.
I think it should bother us that someone at the head of a Free software company has actively contributed to a campaign to reduce the freedoms of a group.
On the AI topic:
I think any true Intelligence born from computers will be so alien to us that we wonât recognise it as such.
The closest we will come may be highly complex simulations which will always be some programmerâs interpretation of intelligence.
The internet is nearly at the point where we are all neurons in a planet scale brain. Does that count as an Artifical Intelligence if part of it is organic but wouldnât work without the artificial (essentially cybernetic)?
Evolution at itâs core is trial and error. Do the wrong thing you die, do the right thing you live and pass this on to your children.
Intelligence is a kind of meta-evolution, allowing us to do some trial and error in our heads instead of for real. But like evolution it is shaped by the world around it. Machines do not occupy the same world as us, aside from a minority of robotic machines, and such their perceptions and needs will shape a much different form of intelligence.
Ahhh I see, good point. But I think that machines could have more and more sensors about the world around them and evolve from that data. It is not inconceivable.
We always think of AI as being like a human. Why does it even have to be like a human at all? I was at a science museum in Chicago for their Robotics Week celebration and they had a dinosaur called Pleo ( http://www.pleoworld.com/pleo_rb/eng/index.php ) whose ultimate personality was determined by how it was treated. If you mistreated it, it would learn to be afraid. If you treated it well, it would respond in kind.
They also had a therapeutic seal that responded to touch. It is hypo-allergenic and used in hospitals. It simulates the affection you might get from a pet in an environment where a pet is not allowed. Surely this affectionate behavior, as perceived by humans, is a form of intelligence.
xD