ROBOT

People with prosopagnosia are unable to recognise other people by looking at their face, but can live into adulthood without realising that other people find it easy.  In this episode Dom discovers that most people can perform tasks they don’t like and instead of hating the experience they can simply change their minds and enjoy it instead (and they’re not just blatantly lying about it).  It’s a simple thing that just about everyone can do, except Dom, apparently.

Anyway, AI is the future and it’s going to take your job and it’s so dangerous that we should probably stop making it but we have to keep making it and did you see how we set one up that we neglected to do anything to contain what it did and then specifically programmed to do crazy shit and then it totally did the crazy shit we programmed it to do wow that’s great press to both say so it’s really dangerous but also we’re on the verge of post scarcity that everybody is welcome to share like an Ian M. Banks novel that didn’t have any creepy overtones about AI at all and had a reference to “knife missiles” that is fortunately not a real name for a weapon and is just a nickname for one so we don’t need to worry about anyone building something like the real thing because that would be totally fucked up, right?  

Dom references two books that he believes are still an interesting read, if you can find them and have the time:

Nils J. Nilsson (2010).  The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements. Cambridge University Press.  ISBN 978-0-521-12293-1.

(The interwebs says Nilsson’s book was published in 2009, but the print copy Dom has specifically states it was first published 2010.  Maybe that’s the paperback edition.  The ISBN for the hardback is 978-0-521-11693-8 so maybe that has something different.  Publishers love to do this kind of stuff.  Take, for example, the Grosset and Dunlap print of Dracula where they couldn’t be bothered mentioning the reprint in the verso)

Theodore Roszak (1986).  The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking.  Pantheon Books and Random House.  ISBN 0-394-54622-9.