Did you know that Jaywalking laws were made to protect car companies and not people? No? Well unlike most of our blogpost your about to learn something.

 

Back in the early 1900s the streets were used by anyone who wanted them. You had people walking, biking, and driving. But the driving part was the problem. As cars were so new people drove them around carelessly, often hitting and killing poor travellers. But because of this, public outcry almost banned cars from the streets. For the people getting rich off of those machines this was bad. So they decided to spin the media around to place the blame on pedestrians, calling them insulting slurs like “Stupid Jays-walkers!” This turnaround work so well that car were given full rights to the roads. And the then slur is now a legal term for walking on the street unlawfully.

But if power hungry corporations can change the rules, what makes rules so important? And that begs the question “How Should We Make The Rules?” Now this story also makes me think of the question “What if those cars were conscious beings with hopes and dreams?” But we’ll get to that later.

 

So, what does this have to do with school? I mean surely Ms. Willemse isn’t just showing us Adam Ruins Everything videos all day, is she? No, this has to do with our concepts. We have been doing a lot of reading on various different forms of literature all connecting to seven themes. These themes were;

1. Power and Authority
2. Humanity and Inhumanity
3. Violence and Destruction
4. Human nature
5. Civilization and Savagery
6. Innocence and Evil
7. Individualism and Community

After knowing these inside and out we had to write a paragraph that talked about a theme involving one of these concepts. For example here is my paragraph taking about Humanity vs Inhumanity in the way we treat machines with Artificial Intelligence.

How do we treat our machines? Some say we worship our electronics like the Egyptians worshiped cats. But if machines could think or speak would they like how we treat them? feel the same? Maybe they don’t like being stored away for years or dropped on the concrete. Now you may be telling yourself this is ridiculous because machines can’t think. But how do you really know that that machine is any different from a person? The concept of a sentient Artificial Intelligences has been in the media and pop culture for decades. Just look at “Westworld, Her, Ex Machina, Chappie, I Robot, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Short Circuit, The Iron Giant, War Games, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Terminator, and even going back to 1927 with the German Weimar Period film Metropolis.” But unlike the world back in 1927 we are closer to creating life than ever before. However, what make something living? Well the most common answer is consciousness. Unfortunately there is no clear consensus on what consciousness is. We know you need lots of different complex systems to be considered conscious. And machines do have these, but the critical difference is that we don’t just receive information, we use it out of our own free will. Although the most difficult part of all this is that science doesn’t have an answer. We can never truly know what someone else is thinking. For example, we have been taught since birth that the sky is blue. Although, your blue might look like my red or green due to your visual input. But the only way we know how to describe it is to say it’s blue. We will never know because we can’t look through each other’s perspectives. The same goes for the question “how do I know I’m not the only conscious thing in the universe?” Yes you can talk to other people but how do you know that they aren’t just saying the appropriate response? How do you know if they feel? How do you know they’re considered conscious?

Now, every story throughout history has two sides in one way or another. This being the A.I. And the Humans. The human side draws one or more similarities to the white soldiers in Three Day Road. These soldiers thought of the First Nations characters, Elijah and Xavier as lesser beings and tokens in the military. They either found them intriguing, annoying, or of no value. But ones the pair showed of their skills and talent things changed. Some accepted the boys now that they have earned the right to be with them. Well other Became weary of their actions, always thinking about their future capacity. This is the same mentality we have towards machines. We treat them as objects with not higher purpose other than to serve our needs. But who’s to say we wouldn’t watch their evolution closely. Some would accept new sentient friends now that they’ve proven themselves. Well others would conspire about the possibility of an overthrowing.

 

But what if this is all new to you? What if you are getting new information and have to act to it quickly? This is how a newly sentient A.I. Would feel. And if it was to search for a similar scenario it would probably consider MacBeth. In the play MacBeth get a prophesy about becoming king and uses his new power to make it come true. Now if a robot was to gain consciousness, it would have to decide what to do with its new knowledge fast. And if it was told that it could become the new ruler if it took out the old one, would it do it? Well, right now we can’t know for sure due to a lack of A.I. Perspective. But we can hope that we don’t become obsolete in the lenses of our new equals.

 

Now this it a difficult topic to talk about because we don’t know what will happen in the future and what variables with change in the meantime. But all that we can do is hope. Hope that humanity will have a redeeming quality worth saving.