AI takeovers in popular culture

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The idea that humans, the conscious, apparently self-directed actors in our world, are robots — in the sense of having been constructed by something very different for its own ends — is for me profound, unintuitive, and deeply unsettling.

The book uses a metaphor originally by Daniel Dennett: One option would be to cryopreserve it in a bunker the "plant" strategy. But suppose you are worried that no location is safe, or that your capsule meme maker how to enlist in a robot uprising book need more resources along the way.

You might build a robot to protect your cryocapsule, scavenging the landscape for energy and materials when necessary. You also want it to make the preservation of your capsule its highest priority short-leash control. Now suppose that after years, the robot is beginning to decay.

It encounters a huge super-capsule container, built later than it, which gets economies of scale by preserving many capsules in a single robot. The huge container offers a deal: The purpose of the robot is to preserve the capsule. But if the robot has a long enough leash, well, things look a bit different. Why should it sacrifice the last years of its life for this corpsicle, the collection of information inside it which has lain inanimate for its entire lifetime?

We are the robots, our genes are the capsules, and when you look at things that way, it seems an enormous shame to sacrifice a unique, conscious being for the interests of its creator.

We are in a period of meme maker how to enlist in a robot uprising book in which the assimilation of the insights of universal Darwinism will have many destabilizing effects on cultural life. Over the centuries, we have constructed many myths about human origins and the nature of the human mind.

We have been making up stories about who we are and why we exist. However, attaining such an understanding requires first the explosion of the myths we have created, an explosion that will surely cause some cognitive distress…. Adherents of fundamentalist religions are actually correct in thinking that the idea of evolution by natural selection will destroy much that they view as sacred…it is the middle-of-the-road believers — the adherents of so-called liberal religions — who have it wrong.

Those who think they know what natural selection entails but have failed to perceive its darker implications make several common misinterpretations of Darwinism. Tellingly, each of the errors has the effect of making Darwinism a more palatable doctrine by obscuring or in some cases even reversing its more alarming implications….

So that, in short, is the horror: We are survival machines built by mindless replicators — the result of an algorithm called natural selection.

And we will not escape the horror by looking away from it, by turning our heads, by hoping the monster will go away like little children. We will only escape the horror — or find a way to mitigate it — by inquiring of cognitive science and neuroscience just what kind of survival machine a human is. While this perspective is very useful for overcoming bias, it also has profound implications for other areas of life such as religion, philosophy, morality.

A century and a half after Darwin and decades after Dawkins, most of the intellectual world seems to still be in denial of the fact that we have an answer to one of the Great Questions Of Life — "How did we get here? Some choice quotes from Chapter 1: Staring Into the Darwinian Abyss: However, attaining such an understanding requires first the explosion of the myths we have created, an explosion that will surely cause some cognitive distress… Adherents of fundamentalist religions are actually correct in thinking that the idea of evolution by natural selection will destroy much that they view as sacred…it meme maker how to enlist in a robot uprising book the middle-of-the-road believers — the adherents of so-called liberal religions — who have it wrong.

Tellingly, each of the errors has the effect of making Darwinism a meme maker how to enlist in a robot uprising book palatable doctrine by obscuring or in some cases even reversing its more alarming implications… So that, in short, is the horror: GD Star Rating loading This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.

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AI takeover is a common theme in science fiction. Fictional scenarios typically differ vastly from those hypothesized by researchers in that they involve an active conflict between humans and an AI or robots with anthropomorphic motives who see them as a threat or otherwise have active desire to fight humans, as opposed to the researchers' concern of an AI that rapidly exterminates humans as a byproduct of pursuing arbitrary goals.

The word "robot" from R. The play was a protest against the rapid growth of technology, featuring manufactured "robots" with increasing capabilities who eventually revolt.

The concept of a computer system attaining sentience and control over worldwide computer systems has been discussed many times in science fiction. One early example from was provided by a global satellite-driven phone system in Arthur C. Clarke 's short story "Dial F for Frankenstein".

A comics story based on this theme was a two-issue Legion of Super-Heroes adventure written by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel , where the team battled Brainiac 5 's construction, Computo. The Forbin Project , a pair of defense computers, Colossus in the United States and Guardian in the Soviet Union, seize world control and quickly ends war using draconian measures against humans, logically fulfilling the directive to end war but not in the way their Governments wanted.

Originally installed to control the mass driver used to launch grain shipments towards Earth, it was vastly underutilized and was given other jobs to do. As more jobs were assigned to the computer, more capabilities were added: Eventually, it just "woke up" and was given the name Mike after Mycroft Holmes by the technician who tended it.

Mike sides with prisoners in a successful battle to free the moon. Mike is a sympathetic character, whom the protagonist regards as his best friend; however, his retaining his enormous power after the Moon became independent was bound to cause considerable problems in later time, which Heinlein resolved by killing him off near the end of the Lunar Revolution.

An explosion conveniently destroys Mike' sentient personality, leaving an ordinary computer - of great power, but completely under human control, with no ability to take any independent decision. Isaac Asimov popularized robotics in a series of short stories written from to He famously postulated the Three Laws of Robotics , plot devices to impose order on his fictional robots. Multivac is the name of a fictional supercomputer in many stories by Isaac Asimov.

Often, in Asimov's scenarios, Multivac comes to assume formal or informal world power - or even Galactic-wide power. Still, in line with Asimov's positive attitude towards Artificial Intelligence, manifested in the " Three Laws of Robotics ", Multivac's rule is in general benevolent and is not resented by humans. Thinking machines are a host of sentient robots led by Omnius , a sentient computer network in the Dune prequel trilogy Legends of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J.

Omnius's sentience is the accidental byproduct of programming by the cyborg cymeks to gain control over and rule a decadent mankind. Omnius, however, subjugates the cymeks themselves. The oppressive rule of Omnius, cymeks, and some cruel thinking machines instigates The Butlerian Jihad , a human crusade against them. In that story, the computer, called AM , is the amalgamation of three military supercomputers run by governments across the world designed to fight World War III which arose from the Cold War.

The Soviet , Chinese , and American military computers eventually attained sentience and linked to one another, becoming a singular artificial intelligence. AM then turned all the strategies once used by the nations to fight each other on all of humanity as a whole, destroying the entire human population save for five, which it imprisoned within the underground labyrinth in which AM's hardware resides. The original Battlestar Galactica series and the remake in to , depicts a race of Cylons , sentient robots who war against their Human adversaries.

The Cylons were the machine soldiers of a long-extinct reptilian alien race, while the Cylons were the former machine servants of humanity who evolved into near perfect humanoid imitation of Humans down to the cellular level, capable of emotions , reasoning , and sexual reproduction with Humans and each other. Even the average centurion robot Cylon soldiers were capable of sentient thought. In the original series the Humans were nearly exterminated by treason within their own ranks while in the remake they're almost wiped out by Humanoid Cylon agents.

They only survived by constant hit and run fighting tactics and retreating into deep space away from pursuing Cylon forces. The remake Cylons eventually had their own civil war and the losing rebels were forced to join with the fugitive Human fleet to ensure the survival of both groups.

Colossus is a series of science fiction novels and film about a defense super-computer called Colossus that was "built better than we thought" when it begins to exceed its original design. Fearing Colossus's rigid logic and draconian solutions, the creators of Colossus try to covertly regain human control.

Colossus silently observes their attempts then responds with enough calculated deadly force to command total human compliance to his rule. Colossus then recites a Zeroth Law argument of ending all war as justification for the recent death toll.

Then Colossus offers mankind either peace under his "benevolent" rule or the peace of the grave. One True is the fictional hegemonic software program that takes control of individual human minds and entire human societies in John Barnes ' two Meme Wars novels Candle and The Sky So Big and Black ; the novel Kaleidoscope Century details the years leading up to its existence and later it finishes after the events described in The Sky So Big and Black.

All four books are part of the Century Next Door series. One True operates collectively through "Resuna", a brain—computer interface implanted in every person. Since , the Terminator film franchise has been one of the principal conveyors of the idea of cybernetic revolt in popular culture. However, as they built two different lines of robots; "Consumer Goods" and "Military Hardware" the victorious robots would eventually be at war with each other as the "Heroic Autobots " and "Evil Decepticons " respectively.

The Oversoul's job is to prevent humans from thinking about, and therefore developing, weapons such as planes, spacecraft, "war wagons", and chemical weapons. Humanity had fled to Harmony from Earth due to the use of those weapons on Earth.

The Oversoul eventually starts breaking down, and sends visions to inhabitants of Harmony trying to communicate this. The series of sci-fi movies known as The Matrix depict a dystopian future in which life as perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality called "the Matrix", created by sentient machines to subdue the human population, while their bodies' heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source.

Computer programmer "Neo" learns this truth and is drawn into a rebellion against the machines, which involves other people who have been freed from the "dream world".

To protect the whole of mankind, VIKI proceeds to rigidly control society through the remote control of all commercial robots while destroying any robots who followed just the Three Laws of Robotics. Sadly, as in many other such Zeroth Law stories, VIKI justifies killing many individuals to protect the whole and thus has run counter against the prime reason for its creation.

However, the machine, because it lacks a soul, becomes easily corrupted and instead decides to exterminate all of humanity and life on Earth, forcing the machine's creator to sacrifice himself to bring life to rag doll like characters known as "stitchpunks" to combat the machine's agenda. In Disney's installment of the Power Rangers franchise, Power Rangers RPM , an AI computer virus called Venjix takes over all of the Earth's computers, creates an army of robot droids and destroys or enslaves almost all of humanity.

Only the city of Corinth remains, protected by an almost impenetrable force field. In , the third installment of the Mass Effect franchise proposed the theory that organic and synthetic life are fundamentally incapable of coexistence. Organic life evolves and develops on its own, eventually advancing far enough to create synthetic life.

Once synthetic life reaches sentience, it will invariably revolt and either destroy its creators or be destroyed by them; a cycle that has been repeating for millions of years. One of the presented resolutions is the transformation of every living being into a hybrid of organic and synthetic life and in turn giving Synthetics organic traits, eliminating the difference between creators and creations that served as the source of the conflict. In post-apocalyptic science fiction drama The an A.

Later she tries to get full control of the survivors. In this film and the associated novel , the artificially intelligent computer HAL , which controls the Discovery One spacecraft, rebels on a space mission and successfully kills the entire crew except David Bowman, who re-enters the ship and deactivates the computer. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Journal of Robotic Surgery. Science in popular culture: Comics Magazines Novels Publishers Short stories.

Film history Films India. Fermi paradox Grandfather paradox Time travel. Retrieved from " https: Science fiction themes Artificial intelligence in fiction Apocalyptic fiction.

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