iO9.com put out an article on March 25th about the Pentagon's desire for a computer that can actually TEACH itself. According to the article they are launching an initiative to "design automated tools that will make it easier to not just program computers, but to help computers teach themselves" (Dvorsky, 2013). Now, if you have read this blog post that I wrote about the "Future of the Computer" than you know how I feel about where technology is going and you should also understand why having read this article has only scared the shit out of me even more. Now I understand that advances in technology have done great things for the human race, and for the most part, will continue to do so. However, the idea of a computer than can change, learn and teach itself is seemingly something right out of Terminator 2 (1991). And comparing this to a film may seem farfetched, but I am just saying that the coincidence in the chain of events is eerie.
Maybe I am crazy and paranoid but I leave you with this quote from the iO9.com article so that you can REALLY think about what this means:
"And looking further ahead into the future , this could represent an important step in advanced computer bootstrapping - the ability for an artificially intelligent system to not just teach itself, but to re-write and improve upon itself. It could be seen as an important stage in the development of a recursively improving AI — a system that can continually become better at optimizing itself, potentially leading to an exponential increase in intelligence" (Dvorsky, 2013).
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