Monday, March 2, 2015

A LITTLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I can never hear about Artificial Intelligence without thinking back to Douglas Adams and his incredible radio show about The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and his wonderful elevators that were artificially intelligent and could see into the future. From wiki
Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. 
This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
They gave whole new meaning to the, Rise of the Machines predicted in Terminator. I'm leaving the planet if any Sirius Cybernetic Company ever start marketing AI.

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