In Slavoj Zizek’s The Matrix, or, the two sides of perversion, he illustrates the meaning of reality. The film, The Matrix is a film that portrays a false reality as one that has been created by machines to mask humans from their subservient, slave-like states. Zizek states that the two aspects of perversion are the reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitrary rules versus the reduction of the subject (humans) to an instrumentalized passivity. In this way there is a constant negotiation of “reality” and just what implications the real world has that a virtual world does not.
As mankind inches closer to developing artificial intelligence we are faced with similar questions. New machines that are able to make informed decisions and act on them have been seen in the most recent Jeopardy competition where two contestants took on a computer. This seems to be a battle between the intelligent capabilities of man versus machine more than anything else. For a computer that has one primary function to match up against a human that has many more would seem unfair, humans just cannot be programmed the way computers very easily are. However, Leslie G. Valiant, a professor at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has received the Turing Award for his work with machines that can mimic the human thinking process, such as the IBM computer that won the Jeopardy competition. Valiant is currently working on increasing the likeness of computer thought and human thought.
Posted by: Mike Anderson
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