Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. Samuel Butler; Darwin Among the Machines ; 1863 "You can't Un-thunk a Glunk!" Dr. Seuss; The Glunk that got Thunk ; 1969 You may or may not be familiar with the poet Dorothy Frances Gurney, but ...
This is not the film I was planning to screen this week. I was in the middle of writing the notes for an entirely different film (which I still plan to screen, just not quite yet) when things happening in the real world changed my mind. I'll come back to this one in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned! This series (which I am continuing to call The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem ) has been exploring depictions of "artificial existence" in cinema, in literature and in popular culture; prompted of course by the rapid and (for some) alarming explosion of actual A.I. in our modern lives. I get it. I understand why emotions are running so hot. Machines are talking to us. Doing our homework for us. Writing articles for us (not for me, actually; I enjoy writing this stuff far too much to hand it off to a computer) and in some cases apparently having sex with us (LGBTQIA+ AI ? Don't worry; what you do in the privacy of your own ChatBot is no one else's business). A.I. is everyw...
Earlier this month, the New York Times conducted a little experiment. They provided a series of writing samples in various styles and genres (Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction; Fantasy; Poetry etc) and presented readers with two extracts in each category. One of the two passages (we weren't told which one) was written by a human, while the other was generated by A.I. We were asked to choose our preference. Crucially, the test did not ask us to guess which one was human; it simply asked us to judge which was the better piece of writing. The response from readers was fascinating, to say the least. Many commenters angrily denounced the experiment as "unfair" or "meaningless". "I don't really understand the point here." grumbled one contributor. "It asked me which I preferred. It didn't ask me 'which one is the human'." Others were angry with themselves because of the choices they had made. "This is uncanny and downright ...
Consider Hamlet . I'm sure you remember Hamlet. Gloomy guy. Wears black a lot. Talks to himself. Likes to hang out in cemeteries. Now, imagine for a moment that you are Hamlet. You are the Prince of Denmark (congratulations!) and heir to the throne. While you're off at University doing the "student" thing, you receive word that your beloved father (the King) is dead; murdered, it turns out, by your horrible Uncle, who then promptly marries your mother (eww) and usurps the throne, snatching it away from you before you even have a chance to catch the next train home. Your father's ghost (who is, you learn, burning endlessly in some harrowing Purgatory, suffering torments beyond imagining) confirms all this, and urges you to take revenge on his behalf. You're not really the right guy for this sort of thing; you're more the academic type. Revenge isn't your natural style; your first instinct would probably be to write an essay at them or something... bu...
When I was doing my music A-Level (about 150 years ago, give or take) I had one particular professor who was, shall we say, flexible with her facts. I don't doubt her qualifications, and I'm sure she was eminently capable in her chosen field, but I came to realise that nothing she said to us in class was reliably accurate. Sitting through her lectures became something of a "spot-the-mistake" game, which isn't really meant to be the purpose of a music A-Level. We were told, for example, that Mozart was born in 1754 (no) and that Bach's Brandenburg #4 featured trumpets (not so much). On and on it went; class after class, mistake after mistake. It was my own fault, I suppose; I should really have spotted the red flag the first day I met her, when she spoke to me about Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings , then asked me if I could tell her more about the "tenor horn". I found myself explaining to my future lecturer that the "...
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