‘SIB’ as he was called by those who knew him – or wanted to know him, more accurately – became a dear friend to me over the years. He was the third generation of Superior Intelligence Beings: humanity begat SIB I, SIB I begat SIB II, SIB II begat SIB III, just as SIB III will beget SIB IV.
Here I must digress into history to illustrate the miracle of the SIBs. Please forgive the theoretical mumblings of an old man, but as with all old men I am amazed at how things have changed over the course of my life. My first memories of AI were of reasonably intuitive computer games and smart-homes that simply got to know the preferences of the owner and adapted to please. The erotics industry probed the boundaries between human kind and artificial-kind*. Their efforts to assist the lonely made great advances in tactile and mental human-simulation.
The old tests and theorems** regarding the development of AI quickly became defunct as it was discovered that a number of real humans themselves could not convincingly prove either their intelligence or their cognition. This led to a re-analysis of what was meant by intelligence and the question ‘Can machines think?’ changed briefly to ‘What is thinking?’ and then ‘Can humans think?’
One quickly gets bogged down and though the topic is worth further study I shall skip ahead. It was time for language to go back to brass tacks, as they used to say in the days when such things were the height of invention. For the purposes of studying and developing AI, ‘intellect’ was reduced in definition to: ‘the faculty of reasoning, knowing, and thinking’, without the historical and social context which implied a certain wisdom and righteousness. Intelligence became simply a measure of mental ‘muscle-power’, which to me is no different to how it was, as the intelligentsia has a long history of thinking and doing incredibly stupid things.
* As you can see, I am struggling with the language surrounding these
creations. There are so many terms and colloquialisms associated with
this technology that the use of them outside of the ‘industry’ is a
matter of personal taste and of course the slant one is speaking on.
Here is a list off the top of my head, regardless of the positive or
negative connotations: android, AI (artifi cial intelligence), ai,
artificial kind, automaton, droids, mecha, mechs, replicant, robot, SIB,
sims (simulateds), simulacra, zippers and zoids.
** Such as the Turing Test, in which a human judge converses with both a human and a computer subject without knowing which is which.
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