University:
Harrisburg University of Science and Technology
Course:
ENGL 300 | English Language Literature
Academic year:

2019
Views:

369

Pages:

2
Author:

Leilani Contreras

THE FUTURE OF A.I. If you spend any time watching movies about the future of A.I. robots, you would be quickly concerned about our future of artificial intelligence. But is this concern founded in any actual science? Michael Littman, in his essay “Rise of the Machines” Is Not a Likely Future, rejects the idea of concern over the future of A.I. While the idea of technology growing at an exponential rate is true, it does not mean we will have the ability to create anything that is true artificial intelligence. We are creating mimicries of human beings with robots today like “Sophia”, but they are not thinking for themselves and therefore are not technically artificial intelligence. Littman brings up the point that “it is a logical impossibility that these computers would be able to accurately simulate reality faster than reality itself.” Even just watching the robots we are building now, they take a few seconds to register what is said and come up with a pre-programmed response. I agree with Littman here, having an A.I. robot be able to understand its surroundings well enough and interact seamlessly with other human beings, is not in our close future. WORDS MATTER In her short story, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor shares a snippet of a young man's life. This story has many facets, depending on what you are looking for. It touches on racism, the harmful ideas of class, and lineage. The main character, Julian, is stuck with the chore of riding the bus with his mother to her health class. He is quite resentful of this and of his mother’s attitudes. His mother is stuck in the older social order mindset when the color of your skin mattered along with the idea that who your parents are, made you important or not. On their bus ride, she is quite blatantly racist in her remarks, so to “get back” at his mother in his own mind; Julian goes and sits next to a colored man on the bus. Julian is a sad and depressed man, who seems to fit the old saying “Misery loves company”. The only joy he seems to find throughout the story is by upsetting his mother. Towards the end, his mother pushes the buttons of a colored woman on the bus and after they get off, she tries handing a penny to the woman’s son. This pushes the woman over the edge, after dealing with Julian’s white passive-aggressive mother for the ride; she hits her and runs off. Julian sees this as karma and goes on to tell her how she deserved this treatment. However, his mother seems to have been hit harder than he thought because she collapses and seems to be dying, as he runs for help. You can take what you want from the story, one point being though that you shouldn’t take joy in others' misery.