Artificial Intelligence
From Gothpoodle
While humanity has become more and more diverse, new forms of sentience have appeared on Earth. Among these are the final achievement of Third Wave digital civilization: fully sapient computers.
The arrival of sapient AI has actually been a long process. The first computers capable of passing the so-called “Turing test” appeared as early as 2015, depending on how strictly one applies Turing’s criteria. Certainly the most advanced machines of the time could run software granting them the ability to interact with humans in idiomatic “natural” language, developing distinctive personalities of their own. In the course of the 21st century, computer hardware and software continued to advance, and such personality simulations became commonplace. By the 2040s even a typical personal computer could interact with its user as if it were a friendly and cooperative sapient being.
Such machines were certainly intelligent, but the question of whether they were sapient beings remained open. In some sense, that question remains open to the present day. The nature of consciousness remains obscure, so it remains impossible to prove or disprove the self-awareness of any advanced computer. Asking the machines themselves is no help – some claim to be self-aware, others (sometimes of the same model, with the same software base) claim not to be. Hard-line “vitalists” continue to maintain that only biological organisms can be said to be creative, sapient beings, but this position is harder to defend with each passing year. Today, most people simply don’t worry about it, and treat anything that behaves intelligently as a human-equivalent. In any case, about the time of the Pacific War, machines of human-level intelligence became cheap and widely available. Today almost any desktop, vehicle or cybershell “brain” has the potential for intelligence about equal to that of an unmodified human being. Such computers can be built and maintained for much lower cost than that necessary to “build” and maintain a human being. The most advanced machines have attained what would be considered genius-level intelligence in a human. Although such computers are extremely expensive, they have certain advantages over human beings – they are much better at concentrating on a specific task, they can correlate vast amounts of information very quickly, and they can use a much wider variety of sensory equipment.
As a result, the long rear-guard action fought by human labor against the advance of automation is entering its last stages. Machine intelligence can now replace biological intelligence in a tremendous variety of occupations, including creative and decision-making tasks. Indeed, it is now possible for biological intelligence to become machine intelligence, using the new “downloading” technologies.
This situation is bringing many of the most developed nations to the point of crisis. In most of these societies, unemployment is rising very rapidly and putting considerable strain on society. Most futurists believe that Earth is moving toward a global “leisure society,” in which most human beings need not work at all. How to attain such a goal remains unclear. Some nations are building massive social-spending programs, ensuring that the chronically underemployed have a minimum income sufficient even for a few luxuries. Others, less accustomed to running a welfare state, are suffering serious social tensions. These are often generational (as young unemployed find themselves envying the older investor class) or ethnic (as unemployed immigrants find themselves envying wealthy natives). There is also a strong anti-technological bias in some of today’s labor movements, as the unemployed violently resist the further spread of automation.
Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether the machines themselves are willing to support an “unproductive” class of biological citizens. Most intelligent computers are simply programmed to work loyally, but many of the most intelligent are self-programming, and are liable to question their place in society. So far there has been no organized machine resistance, but there are a number of “machine liberation” movements worldwide, supported by both intelligent machines and biological citizens. Some nations have responded by defining categories of citizenship for emancipated computers, or even by giving advanced infomorphs a role in government.
