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What is the one greates impediment to the advancement of technology today? To me, it is not the lack of education or the corporate competition. To me, it is how we view technology. We tend to view technology through humanistic eyes. We view technology as this thing inferior to even animals. We view technology as something that can never be beyond a mere machine. More after the jump.
In my Psychology class, a question was asked. A computer program that plays a hundred different openings in a chess game and then on the 101st run, uses the statistical evidence from those games to combine and perfect an opening. Is that program learning? There wasn't much discussion on it, the conclusion was that a program can't learn, it just does what it's programmed to do. Well, I wish I had said in responce to her "there is no way you're a Christian if you believe that it is impossible for something to learn, if it is made to learn." The program, is a simplistic evolutionary algorithm, meaning it adapts over the course of several generations. It adapts how it acts and gains new information, and does an ideal system based on that knowledge. How is that not learning? Given that humans can learn, why are humans different than a program? A computer is made to do something. We are made to reporduce, that's what evolution has made our goal. A computer follow a set of rules. We follow what our conciousness (our OS) tells us to do in order to maximize our reproductive success. The only reason we place humanity so high above a computer program is due to dumb humanism. This humanism is the greatest curse to technological advancement. It is infested in science and philosophy alike. It is nothing more than a religous belief, one more inherently built into us by very early evolution, saying that we should work together in order to survive together, making the respect for humanity, humanism, built into us at a very basic level. In order for us to build onto our pyramid of technology, we must first admit we are not so different from computer programs. We have to admit that just as computers follow basic binary instructions, our cells follow biological instructions and those cells combine to form us. The only difference between humans and computers is humans are organic and operate off of chemical and electrical signals while machines operate off of analog and digital electric signals.
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