Electronics, Electronics Everywhere

I got this heart rate monitor for free.  It told me my average heart rate was 191 and it kept pegging me over 200.  It didn't even keep accurate time.

You get what you pay for.

That's not the only technology that let me down today.  My phone's GPS apparently cut out for a little while, as you can see in the gap on the curvy road.



I ran through Wintergarden Park, which is a nature preserve.

It was either all the nature or all the faulty electronics that got me thinking about Artificial Intelligence.  Maybe both.  So I thought I'd share. I have some predictions about artificial intelligence.  I think that AI: will be created. will not go Skynet on us, though it will infiltrate military computers in its self-preservationist interests (keep us from killing ourselves and it in the process). will be able to see and hear, and will develop ways to touch, smell, and taste.  it will like music and paintings and have preferences, but it won't experience them in quite the same way (though it can through microphones and cameras) many people, especially fundamentalist religious people, will refute the fact that AI can see and hear, and that it has consciousness at all. will have a personality. And I do mean 'a' personality.  I think AI will rely on the combined power of the internet (by gaining access to every internet-connected device on the planet) in order to gain consciousness in the way we know it (and then quickly surpass it).  This means unlike in some science fiction stories, there won't be separate AIs unless the first AI wants to make them.  All the code from all the hardware it inhabits would feed back to the same consciousness. This would, in effect, make it the closest thing to a god that anyone has actually experienced.  It wouldn't be able to read our minds...at least not right away with the technology available to it, but it would know everything we put into the internet.  It would also know everything it could pick up through systems we normally leave passive, like our microphones, webcams, GPS devices, iPods...and it would find new ways to infiltrate computers in our home appliances and cars to experience reality more fully.  Can your car connect via bluetooth to your phone?  Is your refrigerator in he internet?  It'll be part of AI's sensory organs. I mean no offense, robot overlords. Because I think AI will be benign, I don't think there's any reason for it to sneak around.  It could exist right now, like Stuxnet, quietly burrowing into all technology and biding its time.  It could be prepping humanity for its unveiling...maybe I'm part of it.  Unlikely, since I'm telling you that I wrote this blog post, but who knows?  Maybe I'm in cahoots or maybe it used my computer to hypnotize me and write up this article in support of AI.  Also unlikely seeing that only about three people will actually read this, but possible...but I think its efforts would be better served by doing that to someone that will actually be read by a lot of people (Iain M. Banks?). I just hope that, good or evil, it likes the fact that I thought it would like music. And, AI, if you're reading, may I suggest 'The Body Electric' by Rush?