RIFLE RANGE BOY

Coded Bias (Netflix Documentary, 2020) Director: Shalini Kantayya If passing the Turing test marks the acceptance of an automaton as a legitimate thinking body, we must also have a test to ascertain whether we have enough intelligence to be identified as a full-bodied homosapien at all. We think we are wise, but we repeatedly fall prey to sweet talks and indulgences in a single minute's pleasure, only to brood it all the morning after. We give away all our personal and intimate information willingly, only to realise much later that it has been used against us by the powerful. In the name of the country and doing good deeds, we surrender, only to be led to the slaughter. Even when it comes to sending someone to the guillotine, there is discrimination. This, an MIT computer scientist, Joey Buolamwini, found it the hard way. When working on a facial identification device, she increasingly realised that machines repeatedly falter in identifying black and brown faces. When she wore a wh...

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds. Author: Rajiv Malhotra Look at God and His invention from a philosophical angle. God created all beings, including Man. From a simpleminded simpleton, he evolved to develop a brain complex enough to tap the secrets of the Universe. His intelligence found new frontiers and was able to create and modify new lifeforms. Pretty soon, Man thinks he is better than God. He sometimes thinks God/Universe does not exist. Man is the centre of the Universe, and everything revolves around him. In self-discovery and expansion of human intellectual capacities, he discovered artificial intelligence (AI). From a tool to aid Man in his day-to-day mundane and repetitive jobs - help him around the house and then help in factories, AI slowly began, through Man's astute observation, that many of our actions and problem can be broken down into algorithms.  Over time, these algorithms were created for AI to be creative and responsive indepen...

I heard that the human race is redundant. The race is useless. They are dispensable. They are more of a nuisance. Putting a small segment of the population aside, the majority can be done away. We need to propel the human race forward with its knowledge, advancement in sciences, development of the arts and exploring of the spaces beyond the confines of our Milky Way. The way we act, we tend to create animosity and thrive on separating ourselves under banners of race, religion, skin colour, social class and what not. Workers are not reliable. Like Neanderthals, we fight, squabble over trivialities influenced by our animalistic instincts.   Lost in Space "It does not compute!" The world is changing, but the only thing that holds us down are people themselves. Despite the easy access to a plethora of information at their fingertips for them to peruse, judge and form their opinions, we opt to stay ignorant and behave like zombies, wandering aimlessly to the wand of thei...

Ex Machino (2014) When the upright apes started exploring the savanna and heading out of Africa, little did they realise that they were leading to extinction. Not only the descendants of these apes would quickly destroy their own kind and reflect, 'I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds', they would also create machines that one day possibly annihilate them. This is the premise of this and many other apocalyptical sci-fi movies. The one that makes this film different is the inclusion of artificial consciousness as compared to artificial intelligence what most scientists test. The Turing test, when humans are unable to differentiate an interaction with a machine from that of with a human may be the benchmark of AI excellence, but it only measures intelligence, not consciousness. It tests the adaptability of the machine to its environment. In the case of a conscious machine, it processes external information, transforms it with its subjective ju...