Of Minds and Machines

"Computerworld - The National Science Foundation has awarded a $25 million grant to Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study how the brain creates intelligence and how that process can be replicated in machines."  Computerworld article

New technology has guided us into an Information Age; this is an age that is less divisive than ever in the past because the tools are so wide-spread that there is no excuse for ignorance. Now, you're either willfully ignorant of the advances around the world or you are being controlled. Technology is both a tool of freedom and a weapon of oppression.

Why spend millions of dollars on studying intelligence from inside a square? Capital now drives progress, and while the dollar is dying we are no longer driven by the urge to explore and discover--we are driven by monetary and limited gains. This hinders progress. I am hopeful, yet wary of the whole thing: I feel they have jumped the gun a bit. Why not first spend more time thinking about the reason and value of being a corporeal individual being vs. a machine or cog in the wheel of capitalistic values.

It excites and terrifies me how so much is invested in ideals that can, seriously, be simplified with a few numbers. People are looking such great things with such narrow lines drawn, and this keeps society away from addressing the problem of consumer technology and the issues of over-consumption, propaganda, and meaning itself. Life loses meaning when it's watered down to a few sensory outputs, which to me is not the point of progress or evolution.

You can't manufacture the future without understanding the present, and our digital footprint is quite immense and valuable-- in an artificial sense, our history has also become a re-run. Every day we are making the same mistakes, and the mistake is choosing to substitute nature for innate ideas, blanket generalizations, and ultimately stepping away from the real world; opposed to some virtual & incredibly value-less reality. From the roots to tops of trees. Our flaw is that we're substituting not only human value for a bunch of $$$$$, but putting it toward more "science and tech" and maybe with a little luck this new project's fund won't be put toward another WMD. (like giant flesh tearing, fear mongering machine soldiers or cyborgs.)

I won't argue with an educated student toying with his robotic theory, while homes are being foreclosed on and families are dying all around the world--because I don't want to waste my time with children who need to grow up and actually do something about the world we live in now and not invent a new one. Even if a self-driving car makes you feel superior, at the root of it all, you're going to eventually have to give up the notion of knowing how to drive in the first place. Embrace the comfortable safety of this isolated hope, that somehow you matter to a machine--because we are becoming the machines we've made in our image.

What do I think? I don't want my future to be run by machines because even if you can replicate the intelligence to some degree of a human being, you'll never replicate the human heart. That's the one small piece of the puzzle that can be easily dismissed--since we thought we understood where intelligence came from and failed to look inward.