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"We are all repositories for genetically-encoded information that we're all spreading back and forth amongst each other, all the time. We're just lousy with information."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Ava | ||
| A piece of learning software. |
Anton has an unusual job; he provides input for an endlessly curious artificial intelligence used, as far as he can tell, to make inventories of the most obscure objects imaginable.
| Antar had met children who were like that: Why? What? When? Where? How? But children asked because they were curious; with these AVA/Iie systems it was something else - something that he could only think of as a simulated urge for self-improvement. .. She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen… Once she'd wrung the last meaningless detail out of him, she'd give the object on her screen a final spin, with a bizarrely human smugness, before propelling it into horizonless limbo of her memory. |
| Technovelgy from The Calcutta Chromosome,
by Amitav Ghosh. Published by Avon Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
Many people spend their time as servants to automated machines (like factory workers); how would you feel if asked to be a tutor for machines? Especially given the fact that once you had poured in everything that you knew, that teaching could be duplicated in seconds for as often as it was needed? Every moment you taught, you were bringing yourself closer to obsolescence.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Calcutta Chromosome
More Ideas
and Technology by Amitav Ghosh
Tech news articles related to The Calcutta Chromosome
Tech news articles related to works by Amitav Ghosh
Ava-related
news articles:
- Amazon Mechanical Turk - Humans Help Slow Computers
- Smart Goggles Identify, Remember What You See
- Kinect@home Needs Your Help Identifying Objects
- AI Trainers: Assisting Artificial Intelligences
- SCiO Scanner Wants You To Be Spock
- Venezuelans Teaching Your Self-Driving Car
- AI4Mars Wants Your Help Driving On Mars
- RentAHuman App Lets AI Agents Hire Humans
| RentAHuman App Lets AI Agents Hire Humans |
| AIs Turn Marxist Under Bad Management |
| Rogue AI Replicated Itself |
| When AI Takes Its First Breath |
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'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
