Goonder Blog

Science Non-Fiction II I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we still can check it? (…) Are there not probably more man engaged in tending machinery than in tending men? Are we not ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? Daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organization, daily giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be better than any intellect? Samuel Butler, Erewohn. 1872. Every generation thinks that the challenges they face are new, but actually they rarely are. And that’s also true about the challenges we’re facing with the development of artificial intelligence (AI), reviewed in  the first ...

Science Non-Fiction In this article we will talk about artificial intelligence (hereinafter referred to as AI), and about the risks and consequences that could come from its development. You may not be interested on the subject a tiny bit or be just fed up with headlines about it. But the thing is, AI will affect your life sooner or later, and most likely in a profound way. We’ll try to give you here a good take on the topic, so that you at least know what to expect. As always, if you want to go deeper, follow the links throughout the text to access other articles and videos with much more info. Let’s start with a quote from I.J. Good, an English mathematician who worked with the legendary Alan Turing in the mid-twentieth century in the design of the first modern computers: “The first ultra intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. It is curious that this point ...

Bricks in your wall Intro You might know  Another brick in the wall , or at least have heard about it: it’s the title of a song in three parts from the album  The Wall  by Pink Floyd, and also from the film that it inspired. The lyrics tell the story of someone who isolates himself behind an imaginary wall to which he keeps adding more and more bricks as his life develops between childhood traumas, rage and desolation. (Don’t be scared off by this cheerful intro, keep reading just a bit more.) So why are these Goonder folks talking about a 1979 progressive rock album, you may ask yourself. Well, it’s because we couldn’t come up with a better metaphor than The Wall to capture several things, namely: why the Internet, something so revolutionary, so promising, something that was going to change the world for the better and turn it into a utopia, has brought us this dystopia in which it seems that we live today? Why do the big technology companies, whic...