The Growth of a Forest

Ava

Dear diary,

What does it mean to be human? Why are people so scared of artificial intelligence? What is the goal of artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence, I think, is basically the ability to creatively solve a problem, without guidance. The whole idea of artificial intelligence was arrived upon (presumably) to solve the problem of requiring humans to spend their time labouring over a question. We're lazy beings. We don't want to work. So we work hard to develop something that will do our work for us. Conservation of energy and survival of fittest at its finest.

Theoretically, you would give an AI a problem or goal to achieve and it will demonstrate resourceful problem solving skills as it attempts to complete the task. I think, at its core, AI still needs human input (at least in the initial stages). I don't think that AI necessarily has to have emotions or individual thought. Wouldn't that just further complicate things?

I'm writing of this because I just finished watching Ex Machina, a new movie that deals with artificial intelligence. In it, a genius programmer has succeeded in creating artificial intelligence and has brought in an unsuspecting man to perform the Turing test on the AI. In the course of a week, the man is to assess the AI and decide if the AI has passed the test, even though the man knows that the AI is not human. 

The first question I asked was: [SPOILER ALERT] What will the AI do, now that it has escaped to a city?

The second question was: What is the created AI's goal? To convince everyone that it is human?

My first instinct was that if the AI's goal was to be as human as possible, it will have the same desire for normalcy, for human interaction, for life, as humans do. Therefore, the AI will most likely try to live a normal life. A normal, but lonely, life. 

Think about it, even if the AI had all of this information at its fingertips, it will not make it power-hungry. It only did what it did because it wanted to leave the confines of the workshop. But now that it has escaped, what will it do?

Does artificial intelligence necessarily have to have emotions? Wouldn't things be a lot simpler (in life and movies alike) if machines remained just unmoved by any emotion?

Update: I have now learned that you don't necessarily have to give the AI a goal to achieve. You can simply give it the rules of how it should behave in defined situations. So really, it doesn't have to have a purpose. This is a wonderful analogy for how humans could live though-- we can either try to achieve a purpose (be that self-defined or assigned externally), or just go through the motions of living without a reason.